The Best Non-Reflective Black Ink for Fountain Pens: De Atramentis Document Black
Most of my fountain pen writing is about personal growth and daily diary. For the majority of the time, I don’t even read them after I finished (My bad, lol). Writing is more like a meditation for me. Thus, I prefer to use all kinds of fun inks to please my eyes during writing sessions. Sheening inks, shading inks, and shimmer inks, I use them all for my diary and planner. Plain black ink is the least favourite of my ink collection compared to all those dreamy colours. I didn’t realize how important a good black ink is until I recently got back to taking study notes.
I use Tomoe River paper notebooks for note-taking. This type of paper is highly ink-expressive, so I started noticing differences in different black inks I use. Some are darker but quite reflective under my desk lamp. They actually hurt my eyes writing and reading them for a longer period of time. So I inked up different pens with different black inks and tested them by writing my diary. Eventually, I found my favourite among them all -- De Atramentis Document Black.
You can see the ink swatches on 68gsm White Tomoe River paper above. It doesn’t appear with a warm tone or cool tone. The base tone is a neutral grey. It’s the least reflective black among all the black inks I have tried. Other than that, it’s waterproof, fast-drying, writes super smooth, and doesn’t dry up on the nib while I stop to think. It has every property I need for writing study notes.
Even with a large amount of ink deposition on paper, it does not have much reflection/shine. You may see that more clearly in the following comparison with other black inks.
Here is a comparison of 5 popular black inks for fountain pens:
Iroshizuku Takesumi base tone is more blue-black and it has a dark copper sheen when it writes wet. It is also non-waterproof and dries fairly slowly on Tomoe River paper.
Sailor Dye Ink Black has a very dark base tone. However, it also suffers from a brownish shine. It is the wettest black ink I have ever tried. It is also non-waterproof.
Graf von Faber Castell Carbon Black has been loved for a long time before I got back to studying. It provides some water resistance but it is quite easy to clean. Unfortunately, it also has a very strong brownish shine. It writes moderate to a tad on the dry side.
De Atramentis Document Black appears the darkest among them all on camera. This is because it is the least reflective black. The wetter the writing samples are, the higher the contrast, compared to other ink swatches. With naked eyes and from different angles, it actually is not the darkest black. In fact, it is slightly lighter than the Platinum Carbon Black. It writes moderate to a tad on the wet side.
Platinum Carbon Black is probably the most popular permanent black on the fountain pen market. I used to think it was the best permanent black fountain pen ink until I met De Atramentis document black. From the comparison, you can clearly see that Platinum Carbon Black appears more greyish compared to the other 4 black colours. The base black colour is masked by a strong silver shine and reflects a lot of light. Therefore, it appears lighter on camera and on Tomoe River paper.
I haven’t tested these inks on different paper as I mainly write on Tomoe River paper. However, I would expect similar results for any sheen-sensitive or ink-expressive paper. Also, it seems that whether a black ink is reflective is not often talked about in the fountain pen community. I would like to know other people’s thoughts on this. If you know some other non-reflective black inks, please comment below and share your experience. It will be much appreciated by others who are also looking for the same type of ink!
Thank you for reading and until next time ❤️
