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Today I'm reviewing Diamine Skull & Roses ink. Diamine Skull & Roses is a Diamine Exclusive ink made specially for sale in Germany. I’ve seen it for sale on “Fountainfeder” and on “Papier & Stift” websites as well as on Amazon. I only have a sample bottle, so I can’t post a picture of the 80ml glass bottle. This is a saturated dark blue ink with red sheen. It doesn’t have quite as much sheen as the Organics Studio high sheen inks, but has more sheen than what you would call a “standard” ink. In my opinion, Diamine Sargasso Sea is a similar standard ink that you could compare with Skull & Roses. It’s a redder leaning blue than the more teal Jalur Gemilang, the other Diamine exclusive, I recently reviewed The fact that it’s a saturated ink that has good sheen, without having too much sheen, comes with a few benefits: It’s a very good blue colour, whether you can always see the red sheen or not. It easily washes off of my hands with cold water and a bit of bar soap (definitely not like Organics Studio Nitrogen, Ralph Emerson, or Henry Thoreau) and it easily flushes out of my converters and pens just using water. It didn’t suffer from any hard starts or non-starts when I put the uncapped pen down to do swab tests, dry times and water resistance. It dried quite quickly on most reasonably absorbent papers and once dry it didn’t smudge or smear. I tested for this by rubbing repeatedly across my writing. I saw no blue or red on my fingers, and no smudging on the page. I really enjoyed writing with it. However, I tend to use more blue inks than any other colour. With these high sheen inks showthrough and bleedthrough can be a problem. There was showthrough on several of the papers I wrote on, but I could still have written on the reverse of some of them. The red sheen is usually more visible when using pens with wetter flow and broader nibs. Flow Rate: Very good.Lubrication: Very good.Nib Dry-out: Not noticed.Start-up: Immediate.Saturation: Highly saturated ink.Shading Potential: Some shading with finer nibs.Sheen: Good red sheen.Banner Generic 80gsm lined pad.Ciak by InTempo.Field Notes.Hibonichi Techo: Tomoe River 52gsm - Slight.Moleskine Clone (UK)Silvine NotebookWhitelines.Spread / Feathering / Woolly Line: Seen on some papers with wetter B nib.Nib Creep / “Crud”: Not seen.Staining (pen): Not seen after several days in the pen - easy clean-up with water.Staining (hands): Easy clean-up with bar soap.Clogging: Not seen. Seems unlikely.Water resistance: Not sold as waterproof but has some water resistance.Availability: Exclusive to Germany available from: Papier & Stift, Fountainfeder and Amazon.