It’s that time of year where everyone’s doing top fives, so instead of a “top inks of 2025”, I’m sharing my top 5 inks of all time (December 2025 edition). These are inks I’ve used for a long time—either staples I’ve had in my collection for years and keep coming back to, or inks I’ve leaned on heavily this year and properly fallen in love with. As always, this is personal taste: I favour widely available, safe, well-behaved inks. I’m not chasing massive sheen or shimmer—I just want inks that write beautifully and are easy to live with. I also run through a bunch of honourable mentions to give you a sense of my broader preferences (yes, there are a lot of blues—blue is my everyday colour, especially darker blues with interesting undertones). A couple of favourites miss the list purely because you can’t realistically buy them anymore, and one misses because it’s still new to me. The actual top five is, in order: Akkerman #13 Simplisties Violet (my go-to standard purple), Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuki-Yo (a warm teal-leaning blue-black vibe), Diamine 1864 Blue Black (my favourite in that colour family and brilliant across nibs), Robert Oster Tranquility (an insanely beautiful aqua/teal that pops), and my forever #1: Diamine Oxford Blue—affordable, available, reliable, and always in at least one pen in my bag.