I've got wood, but now I don't know what to do with it.

If you’re anything like me, you love wood, and your love of wood has taken you to a place where you decided to go ahead and buy a full-on wooden pen. You loved how it looked in the pictures, you buy it, get it home, open it, and once you have it, it looks even better than you thought. So you get ready to fill it with ink and write with it, but you don’t know what color to put in it.

Has this ever happened to you?

I’m a person who needs the ink to match the pen. I’ve tried not doing things that way, but I always just lose it, and end up switching within either minutes or hours. It just rubs me the wrong way.

If you know how this feels, then you’ll understand the following predicament:

Wood is both “many” colors, and varieties of monochromaticism. Brown. Figured koa: brown. Cocobolo: brown. Eucalyptus burl: brown. There are a few exceptions to this (Redheart, Purpleheart, Yellowheart) but by and large, wood is brown.

What do you do if you don’t want to put a brown ink in it?

The issue I face more often is that the wood is a shade of brown. Not quite a match for any brown I have. Even “walnut” ink doesn’t match my walnut pen.

I had a lignum vitae pen I really liked and was carrying around every day, but I couldn’t figure out the right color for it! I had a feeling Alt Goldrun or an equivalent would be a good choice, but with the (nib) point I had in it, it just didn’t look right, and after a while, i had an epiphany; I have the pen because it’s my favorite. I got the pen because I liked it, but no ink seems to fit. Maybe I should just put my favorite ink in it. Out came Naples Blue.

Suddenly, surprisingly…I was happy.