Ink List #1: Fountain Pen Ink Sample Mystery Box (December 2025)

These are the fountain pen inks that were in the Bottle and Plume December 2025 ink sample mystery box.

Note: I post the ink selections from each mystery sample box the month after it comes out. After all I don't want to spoil the surprise for people who want the "mystery" part to stay, well, a mystery.

Sailor Manyo Ukikusa

This is a beautiful, lively fresh green fountain pen ink. It's not so bright that I'd be uncomfortable using it in a letter to a more distant acquaintance (after all, I save the wild and crazy colors for my closest friends and family...and my own journal and notes!).

Here are some swatches.

Sailor Seiboku (pigment)

This is a beautiful, muted (less saturated) mid-blue. You might even call it a "dusty blue." It's a pigment ink, so it's quite waterproof once it dries.

Note: Make sure not to let your pens dry out with pigment inks inside, otherwise you'll need a more chemically aggressive cleaner like Koh-i-noor's rapido-eze.

IWI - Rain Water

This is a beautiful, light turqoise blue fountain pen ink that makes me think of a day spent gorgeously wasting away on some Caribbean beach, gazing into the perfectly clear water. It's the middle of winter here on the East Coast and just the thought of this color warms me up a bit.

Private Reserve - Ultra Black

This is a dark black fountain pen ink, and quite fast-drying. It's well behaved, though I haven't used it beyond a bit of swatching and sampling.

Troublemaker Inks - Simoun

This ink is absolutely wild. A bit of blue-violet-pink shading and sheening madness that I love, and can't get away from. I've been using it to write thank-you notes (every Bottle and Plume order, no matter how small, gets a hand-written thank you note).

Robert Oster - Whiskey

Is it dark orange, or light brown? I have no idea, but "whiskey" is the perfect name for it. This is a lovely color that's appropriate for anything from school notes to a letter to a friend. It's rich and light and kind of relaxing to look at.

Sailor Manyo - Ume

When I was a kid, my dad bought a giant jar of pickled (?) Ume plums (umeboshi). He told me they were the sourest food there is, and we took turns attempting to eat them with a straight face.

This ink reminds me of that: it's a beautiful burgundy or red-purple that's quite interesting to look at. Some inks look amazing on swatch cards and then underwhelm me when I write a page with them; this is exactly the opposite. I saw the swatch and said "meh," but then took some notes with this ink and couldn't stop thinking about how beautiful it looked.

Side note: Soon, I'll sell Sailor pens and ink! That's a huge goal for me in 2026 - for now, the only way to get this ink from me was in the December 2025 ink sample boxes (though I frequently include sailor inks because I like them).

Private Reserve- Ride the Lightning

This is an absolutely wild, sheening, shimmering purple experience (much like the Metallica album, I suppose). I don't like loading up my ink sample mystery boxes with a bunch of shimmering pinks and purples: if people get too many, I'm afraid they'll just sit on the shelf without an occasion that calls for them.

But I like to include at least one crazy ink in each mystery sample box, to push peoples' limits a bit and give them something that they wouldn't normally buy a whole bottle of for themselves, but which they might actually – unexpectedly – enjoy using.

DeAtramentis - Chicago

A beautiful, shading, deep sapphire blue. Appropriate anytime, for all kinds of writing. What's not to love?

Monteverde - Foxy (2025 DC Supershow)

OK, I said I don't want too much wild stuff in each mystery box but I broke my own rule on this one. Monteverde's Foxy is an absolutely wild orange glitter bomb. It's limited edition and I got my hands on a few bottles to share with everyone. Enjoy.

Ferris wheel press - Cobalt Estates

Another shading dark blue. I don't love FWP and don't carry them at Bottle and Plume, because I don't get the feeling they really care a whole lot about what they do, and don't really value their customers (see recent shipping debacles and AMAs from their founder on Reddit for details).

And though I think of them as primarily a marketing company that happens to operate in our fountain-pens-and-fine-writing space, they do occasionally put out some nice stuff. This was an ink I liked as soon as I saw it, and I hope you will, too.

Jacques Herbin - Rouge Grenat

Herbin's Rouge Grenat fountain pen ink is hands-down one of my favorite red inks – no, make that one of my favorite fountain pen inks, hard stop. It's a deep, luscious red that looks amazing no matter the nib width (lighter in a Fine, darker in a Medium or Broad). If this was the only red ink I was allowed to use for the rest of my life, I wouldn't be too mad about it.

Octopus Fluids - Sea Serpent (sheen)

Sea serpent is one of my favorite sheening inks – it's an indigo blue fountain pen ink with copper sheen, which is really striking without coming off as "wild."

The Octopus Fluids line of sheening inks is just amazing in general; it features truly creative combinations of base-colors and sheen colors that you're hard-pressed to find from other ink makers. I mean, where else can you get purple-and-green sheeners (see Goblin and Medusa; they're inverses of each other).


I hope you've enjoyed this. Grab the current ink sample mystery box if you want to be surprised by samples of amazing fountain pen inks like these.