Indian ink

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This article is about the ink. For the play by Tom Stoppard, see Indian Ink (play).

Indian ink (or India ink in American English), also called Chinese ink, is a simple black ink once widely used for writing and printing, and now more commonly used for drawing, especially when inking comics and comic strips. Indian ink is usually not suitable for fountain pens, as it will readily clog the pen. An exception to this is Pelikan Fount India, which does not contain shellac, which can cause clogging.

1 History
2 Uses other than writing
3 See also
4 References

[edit] History

Early treatises on the arts refer to black carbon ink that was prepared by the ancient Chinese and Egyptians. Originally designed for blacking the surfaces of raised stone-carved hieroglyphs, the basis of the ink was a black carbon pigment in an aqueous adhesive or binding medium; for example, a mixture of soot from pine smoke and lamp oil mixed with the gelatin of donkey skin and musk. The ink invented according to legend by the Chinese philosopher, Tien-Lcheu (2697 B.C.), became common by the year 1200 B.C.

Sometime before the 12th century, Eraclius, in his De Coloribus et Artibus Romanorum, presented a set of directions for making several types of carbon inks, including one similar to the Indian ink of China, made from the soot of burning resin or wood. Different types of wood will create different-colored inks. In an English volume on handwriting of 1581, Theophilus presented a recipe for a carbon ink:

To make Inke in haste.

In hast, for a shift when ye have a great neede,

Take woll, or wollen to stand you in steede,

Which burnt in the fyre, the powder beate small:

With vinegar, or water make Inke withall.

As the recipe shows, no binder material is necessary: the carbon molecules are in colloidal suspension and form a waterproof layer after drying; often waterproof shellac is added though.

Indian ink replaced the previously widespread Iron gall ink in the opening years of the 20th century.

[edit] Uses other than writing

Hanetsuki (羽根突き, 羽子突き) is a Japanese traditional game, similar to badminton, played by girls at the New Year with a rectangular wooden paddle called a hagoita, and a brightly-colored shuttlecock. The shuttlecock must be kept in the air as long as possible. Girls who fail to hit the shuttlecock get marked on the face with Indian ink.

Indian ink can also be used for home-made tattoos (sometimes called "prison tatoos"), by inking the preferred design onto the skin and then stabbing over the ink with a sharp sewing pin.

Indian ink is also used in microbiology as a negative stain. This process stains the background leaving the bacterial cell clear. This technique is most commonly used in the capsular stain in which the background is stained with Indian ink and then the bacteria are stained with crystal violet. The result is a dark background, a clear area located at the bacterium capsule, with the bacterium cells appearing purple.