This morning as I was preparing to jot down some very quick notes on a conference I'm organizing, I picked up my Vanishing Point that was lying on my keyboard and I proceeded to click it. On the nib end. Which was already extended.

Ow.

So now I have a bright turquoise pin (soapy mouth) on my right tumb pad which, funnily, does not hurt as much as the mini cut that I made on my other finger with the Chinese vegetable cleaver three days ago.

But still. Ow.

Now you are a true VP user. I've done this more than once. It's easy to do so don't feel bad.

At least, I think it is easy to do.

Yeh, what she said.

I've done it with every one of the pens that I own. AT LEAST once. SEE? (there needs to be a dot in the middle of the thumb on that one)

I stuffed an xf P51 nib into the tip of my thumb three weeks ago. It still has not healed properly.

I still have a blue smudge in my thumb from when I slipped while sharpening a coloured pencil 20 years ago! Hopefully your ink injuries will not still be in evidence in 20 years!

So, we know the real VP users by the distinctive club tattoo, eh? This could be the lynchpin of a mystery story....

I would never do this myself, of course, but I have heard (ahem) that if you have a XXXF Binderised VP nib it can be even more efficient as a tattoo tool.....

Do this often and hard enough and you can earn yourself a tattoo as the 'VP badge of honor'

50 years later and my dad still has a blue dot in his arm where a kid stabbed him with a pencil. OK, "poked" him with a pencil.

hubby has one of these in his palm but it was self inflicted. He was being "cute" and bouncing a pencil (eraser tip down) on his desk and moved to fast trying to catch it (or too slow) and stabbed himself. That'll be at leat 40 years ago.

I haven't seen Johnson around much these days... he reported the same error, and it sounded like he was heavily impaled by his VP! I've never done it, because I always look at the pen before using it--that whole "clip orientation" thing, you know. That's part of the good reason for having it, to sense whether you're holding the pen the right way if you're not looking. So remember, keep in mind the clip. The clip! (as in "the tooth, the tooth!" from Dune...)

I can report that after a few days, though it has not yet healed, the colour has faded. So we now know that Lamy Turquoise is a metabolizable ink.

Wow, 'metabolizable' is easier to spell than to say...

I got a piece of lead in my hand when I sharpened a fresh Berol Mirado pencil and handed it to my sister- she pushed it away and into my hand.