Hello again everyone! 😀 I have another ink review ready and this time my choice fell upon Rohrer & Klingner Morinda! I’m a teacher so I have to use red a lot during my work and this ink has been my go to red ink for grading in the last couple of months. I’ve written with it on really terrible copy paper to some really nice paper as well like Rhodia, Leuchtturm1917, Piccolo Press.

If you’re interested in the review process please check out this blog post. I’ve written it down in detail.

1. Introduction and personal thoughts

Rohrer & Klingner is a German company and has been in the ink game for a century now. Their fountain pen inks are fairly well known in the fountain pen community so I’m sure most of you have already heard about them. They are of course also famous for their calligraphy and drawing inks however those are not suitable for fountain pen use and you should only ever use them with dip pens. Their standard line-up consists of 18 fountain pen inks, their Dokumentus permant ink line-up has 6 and their sketchINK has 10 nano-pigment fountain pen inks.

Before I start talking about Morinda I just want to mention my general experience with Rohrer & Klingner inks. The gist of it is that I find all of them to be really high quality…they’re also really wet inks. It’s up to you to decide whether that trait bothers you or not but for me it’s usually not a problem as it means I won’t have flow issues and I rarely write on paper that allows feathering. I honestly believe they make really good inks as I have never been disappointed by the color (looking at Diamine “Scarlet”) nor the way the inks write. Granted I have only tried out 11 out of the 18 so I might have a fluke when I get around to the last 7 but I doubt it.

Sorry for dragging this on, I’ll talk about the ink now! 😉 So, Rohrer & Klingner Morinda. The ink comes in a 50 ml glass bottle with a really nice looking label and a tin cap to keep the ink from spilling (although I have seen their standard line-up with plastic caps). It doesn’t have a funky smell like some Diamine and Sailor inks do. What I find really nice and interesting is the color of this ink and how it looks under different lighting. I had a bad start with this ink when I first got it a couple years ago because when I inked my pen with it, it was after a long day’s work and it was already dark. So naturally I was in my room with my weak and warmed toned lights and when I wrote my first line I was really disappointed. 🙁 The ink appeared a brownish red to me and I remember saying out loud “This sucks!”. I wrote a couple of more lines, then put everything away and didn’t use it for the rest of the day. As I’m writing this review with the writing sample in front of me (it’s 6 PM at the moment) it looks exactly the same as I first saw it back then. However…

…Cue the next day. I wake up, the Sun is shinning, it was a nice summer morning and since I’m a messy person (send help) of course the notepad I used to test Morinda was lying on my desk. That’s when I saw how this ink really looks like and it was that moment I fell in love with it. You see, this color I saw not a terrible brownish red, instead it was a nice deep, dark red. I think it’s a really unique color and it’s actually quite hard to describe. I tried my best to edit the images (both scans and photos) to resemble what I can see on a sunny day but it will never look exactly like the color you see in real life. In fact it might appear to have orange tones on your screen but in reality it doesn’t really have any orange in it (which I think is just WordPress screwing up the color profile when creating the JPEG thumbnails so be sure to check out the scans at full resolution). I don’t think I have seen another ink that quite matches it. I tried to find a HEX value for the color and this is the closest I came: #B41A30

Although according to Rohrer & Klingner’s color chart actually uses this HEX value: #C9264A but I don’t think it’s realistic.

Now the only problem is I still think this ink looks bad when viewed indoors with poor lightning so I only use it during the day. 😂 So my advice would be to definitely have a look at your inks under the sun. Go to a park, take your swatches and notebooks, grab a drink and browse through them.

The ink is (as expected) quite runny. It’s great in a fountain pen where the feed controls the flow, but using a dip pen (tried both glass and regular steel nib one) will just make a mess. It will quickly run down the groves/nib and you’ll have yourself a blob of ink that somewhat resembles a few letters. So I guess this could be a minus or plus depending on your viewpoint.

Another definitive bad point of this ink is that it’s not water resistant at all (but it will resist it of course pretty well when you’re trying to clean your hands). During the water test, the writing literally washed away and I’m sure if I poured more water on it, I would have been able to completely remove it from the paper.

The price of the ink is pretty okay. It won’t break the bank if you buy it (unless you’re not from Europe). It’s 5€ a bottle right here at Pennonia, but I’ve seen it even cheaper at German retailers. (I mean you can’t really beat them since shipping probably costs next to nothing within Germany)

So in conclusion if you’re looking for an interesting red, I can recommend that you check this ink out but don’t expect any water resistance to come with it. Also does somebody know where the name comes from? 😛 I couldn’t track down why it’s called Morinda.

2. Writing samples

Here are the writing samples. I used a PenBBS 350 with Rhodia 80 g/m2 paper. Click on the images to view them at full resolution.

3. Similar Inks:

4. Extra photos / scans:

5. Products featured:

Thanks for checking out the review! I hope it was helpful and informative! Check back again to catch up on new reviews or hang around in the Pen Addict Slack where I’ll post whenever I make a new one. See you until next time!