review: lennon tool bar tiegan / iron navy blue

We're looking at an ink from Lennon Tool Bar today!

Lennon Tool Bar is a small business based in Tamsui/Danshui (淡水). With my extremely shoddy understanding of Mandarin, I believe they started by working with traditional indigo dying techniques. They've branched out into making inks as well. I think they started with a line of blues, but have since come out with other colors.

I purchased this ink at Ty Lee, which I've mentioned before in my post on Taiwanese brands. If you ever find yourself in Taipei: go to Ty Lee. You absolutely will not regret it. They carry European, Japanese, and Taiwanese brands. If your knowledge of Mandarin is poor or nonexistent, there are a few clerks that speak enough English to help you out.

The name (with "tie" pronounced tyeh, not like a bowtie!) is something like "iron blue." Fun fact: "gan" means purple in most Chinese dialects, but in Taiwanese, it means a navy or dark blue—the definition of it actually comes from Japanese. Fun with linguistics! Google Translate, meanwhile, provides the phrase "iron shovel," which is... similar, I guess.

The bottle is glass with a plastic cap. It has a rubbery plastic insert which covers the mouth; I've only ever been able to pick it out with my fingernails. It does a great job of keeping the bottle completely sealed though.

There's a sticker on the front with a printed blot of the ink and ink name. It also tells you that you get 30ml of ink. These inks are super inexpensive at about NT$200 a pop, or approximately USD$6.50. That's really good, especially for a handmade ink with low distribution!

I imagine Tiegan is supposed to emulate Prussian blue. I think it gets fairly close, though not quite as royal or deep. It is a dustier, slightly more turquoise-colored blue.

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Tiegan flows very readily: it's a really wet ink!  Despite this, it dries in an impressive amount of time. It was basically dry to the touch at the 60 second mark. There isn't any sheen, though there is a nice amount of shading. I really like it in the broader nib.

The clerk at Ty Lee told me that the ink is really waterproof, so I should be careful and not leave it in any pens for too long. Unfortunately, the clerk didn't specify how "too long" was; I'm assuming they meant something like a few months rather than a few weeks. And Tiegan is pretty darn waterproof: just a little of the ink is lifted off.

This is gonna sound kinda weird, but I took a sniff of the ink and it smelled like... baby carrots? Like, it smelled like raw carrots. It's a very, very light scent—you really have to stick your nose in it—but, uh. I guess if you don't like the smell of carrots you're not gonna like this.

When I was using this ink, I thought it would be fairly similar to something like Sailor Jentle Yama-dori. I would say that Tiegan is somewhere between De Atramentis Pigeon Blue and Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo: it's not as green as Pigeon Blue, or as deep as Tsuki-yo, but it does have that sort of gray-ish tone while staying quite blue.

I have this ink in my Lamy Safari Petrol with a broad nib. Like I've said before, it's quite wet, so you'll run through a converter fairly quickly. I found the writing experience very smooth without any issues. I haven't left this ink for long periods of time yet, but as long as you're fairly on top of your pen-cleaning game, you should be okay.

I really enjoy this color! Lennon Tool Bar Tiegan is an interesting color with nice properties. I love supporting small businesses in my home country that work hard to create new and exciting things for a local and thriving community. Unfortunately, like most Taiwan-made inks, Lennon Tool Bar has little distribution outside of the island. However, if you find yourself there, I would highly recommend finding some local inks to try out.

Where to buy

• Ty Lee: bottle