There is an old inkwell on my desk, small enough to sit easily in the palm of a hand, its surface carrying the dullness and tiny marks that come with age, and although I know almost nothing about where it came from or who might once have owned it, I find myself returning to it, turning it over, opening the lid, imagining the hands that must once have performed exactly the same movements.
I have always loved calligraphy, not simply for the beauty of the finished letters but for the act itself: the moment the nib touches the paper, the slight resistance beneath the hand, the changing weight of a line, the gathering of ink at the beginning or end of a stroke, and the concentration that comes when the hand cannot quite keep pace with the thought.
I still use a dip pen and enjoy the small ritual of returning the nib to the ink, although I write with a fountain pen too, including the one lying beside the inkwell in this photograph. There is pleasure in both, and something about ink that I have never quite found elsewhere; perhaps because it refuses to disappear completely behind what it is being used to say.
The inkwell makes me think about the hands that once reached for it.
I wonder what they wrote.
Perhaps letters, when letters were still one of the ways in which a distant person could be brought briefly into a room. Perhaps accounts, addresses, recipes or shopping lists, a birthday carefully remembered, a message written in haste, or words composed slowly because they mattered and could not be retrieved once they had been sent. Perhaps someone once sat with a pen suspended above this little pot of ink, wondering how to begin.
Most of those words, if they ever existed, have probably disappeared.
And yet we know how affecting it can be when handwriting survives, particularly when the person who made it no longer does. Sometimes it isn't the important letter or beautifully kept journal that catches us, but something almost painfully ordinary: a name inside a book, a recipe on a scrap of paper, a few words on the back of a photograph, a shopping list found unexpectedly in a drawer.
The words themselves may tell us almost nothing, and yet we recognise the hand.
The pressure, the slant, the peculiar way an r was formed or a t crossed; movements repeated so many thousands of times that nobody thought to notice them while the person was alive, becoming afterwards something unmistakably theirs.
A gesture has survived its maker.
Perhaps this is one reason I find myself thinking more about handwriting now, when so many of the words around us arrive without any physical trace of the person who made them. Messages appear instantly, mistakes disappear without leaving a crossing-out behind, sentences can be moved and polished until there is no evidence of the order in which the thoughts arrived, and increasingly words themselves can be generated for us.
I am fascinated by what new technology makes possible, including AI, and I have little interest in creating an argument between an imagined better past and an inevitably changing present. But perhaps the arrival of something new sometimes allows us to see more clearly what was contained within something older.
When I write by hand, thought has to travel at the speed of my hand. There are hesitations and crossings-out, changes of pressure, letters that lean unexpectedly, and thoughts that arrive too late and have to be squeezed into a margin. The page remembers the process as well as the result.
This morning, using the fountain pen beside the inkwell, I wrote a sentence that had been turning over in my mind:
The page records something that the finished sentence does not.
Looking at it afterwards, I realised that the sentence had become an example of its own meaning. I could type those same nine words and their meaning would remain, but something else would disappear: the pressure of my hand, the changing ink, the space I had left between one word and another, all those tiny decisions I had made without knowing I was making them.
Perhaps this is also why handwriting has been finding its way increasingly into the things I make for Moss & Maye. I like the place where a written word stops being only information and becomes line, movement and mark; where drawing, print, fragments of botanical material and handwriting can sit together, each carrying some evidence of the hand that made or gathered it.
And perhaps that is part of what I want Moss & Maye itself to hold: not perfection, and not nostalgia, but objects that retain something of their making, and that invite us to look for a little longer before passing on.
The old inkwell seems to belong there.
I cannot know whose hands once reached for it, what they wrote, whether those words mattered to anybody else, or whether a single page survives. The people themselves may have disappeared without leaving even their names attached to it, while this small object has somehow travelled onwards until, years later, another hand opens its lid and another nib is dipped into ink.
There is something quietly moving in that continuity, in an object passing from one life into another while the gesture survives: hand to pen, pen to ink, ink to paper.
Perhaps that is why I still want to make marks by hand in a world that no longer requires me to.
Not because the old ways were better, but because sometimes the making of the mark is part of what we are trying to say.
The inkwell that prompted this piece is now available through Moss & Maye, ready to continue its story in another home.