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I was surprised to not find a samples topic for my favorite in color - Blue/Black. So here it is, post your Blue/Black swatches & thoughts here!

A very recent purchase. I am not quite sure about the age of this item. It looks like it was supplied to Post Offices or Goverment agencies by the Crown mark and HMSO stock code. There are stoneware bottles that once held the liquid ink with the HMSO marks in what looks like a normal label. I intend to do as the instructions suggest, but with distilled water. Maybe weigh the powder and make a portion of it to see what it looks like. I am assuming this ink is a very fine dye powder. No iron-gall content. What do any members here know? Just wondering if the powder is likely to be usable.

Hi, I would like to buy a bottle of Pilot Blue/Black ink, because I have read many complimentary things about it on here, but... ...I live in the UK, and it seems that Pilot won’t let us British types buy it in bottles The only bottled inks that Pilot will let us buy are the 60ml bottles of Namiki Blue or Namiki Black.(Well ok, they do also sell the Iroshizuku ‘luxury’ inks here too. At much higher prices.) AFAIK, there’s only one UK retailer that even sells Pilot Blue/Black in the IC100 pack of Pilot’s proprietary cartridges.But proprietary cartridges aren’t much use to anyone who uses a piston-fill pen (e.g. a Pilot Custom Heritage 92), and nor are they much good to anyone who uses a Pilot ‘MR’.(Pilot’s version of the Metropolitan for the European market; it is a Metro that has been ‘chambered’ for ‘Short International’ cartridges.) Given that Pilot do sell the ‘Custom Heritage 92’ here, can anyone tell me definitively why they won’t sell Pilot Blue/Black in bottles to UK customers? It can not be because the ink contains has been ‘Unpersoned’ at regulatory level (e.g. for containing an ingredient that is persona non grata), because if that were the case the cartridges would be off-limits to us too. Are Pilot & Namiki perhaps two entirely-separate companies who have, after centuries of inter-Corporate feuding, agreed to a mutual-co-operation treaty for the European market that is policed by Weapons-grade Corporate lawyers, and in which Pilot have bound themselves to selling only Namiki’s bottled inks in Europe?But then, Namiki don’t even sell a blue-black, and how would the Iroshizuku range be exempt from such an arrangement? Are Pilot perhaps trying to push me towards buying the ink direct from Japan (from where I will also be able to buy a Custom Heritage 92 for much less than its UK RRP)? My thanks in advance to anyone who can solve this mystery. Cheers,M.

I am in the UK and I was looking for a blue/black that would be getting towards darkness. Well it would be with the iron-gall content... Alright. So Rohrer & Klinger's Salix and there's Diamine Registrar's ink. Both of these I have used. I have also used Hero B/B cartridges. I suspect this to be the same as Hero 232 bottled ink. Furthermore I believe that Hero ink also has IG content. The problem is getting the Hero ink. Amazon UK doesn't have it. It is available on ebay, but I have only found it from a Aussie seller & the shipping is wince-inducing for this Yorkshireman. The three named inks all have different qualities & exhibit different shades, as far as I can see. I have not had samples of all three at the same time, so I can write using the same nib. I think it important to see how they look when using a medium and a EF nib, the sorts that I would usually be using.