Ever since I wrote my other post  How to Make Ink , I have gotten a lot of e-mails and traffic to my site concerning ink making, so I thought I ought to elaborate on the subject. I will write about this subject later too, but for now I want to jot down a few words to satisfy my readers.

Any soot can make ink. Some are better than others, obviously. Every ink maker in prison guarded his secret ingredients and mixture. I guess that’s why you’re looking for the magic potion.

I described in an earlier post one of the processes that I was told. Different people used different processes. Some used the same process (like the one I described in the earlier post) but used different proportions. Like instead of a 50-50 mixture, they may have used a 60-40 or a 30-70 or whatever it was that made the ink the way that they thought it should be.

One of the problems with the limited processing capabilities in prison was that the soot never really liquefied completely. You would put a few stones or ball bearings in the container (like a spray can of paint has) and keep shaking it up prior to taking any out.

Another problem it had was that the rubbing alcohol would eventually begin to evaporate making your mixture begin to dry out. Then you can add more rubbing alcohol and/or water as needed. If it dried out enough, all you’d have is soot left and you would just make the soot into ink again.

In my earlier explanation I gave you “Vaseline” as the ingredient for soot, but I’ve also seen burnt paper or wood used. One of the weird ones I heard of was using the black chess pieces in a chess set. They would burn them and use that soot. Maybe they were onto something. There has to be something in it that makes the chess pieces black, right? Well, to the best of my knowledge, I never saw any tattoos using the chess pieces for ink, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.

The rubbing alcohol came in a couple of ways. If you knew somebody that worked in the infirmary (the inmate hospital in the prison), then you could pay them to steal it for you. The other way is to go to the infirmary as a patient and as certain prescriptions the Doctor would give you little packets with an alcohol soaked gauze inside. If you can get enough of the packets together, you just wring out the gauzes and there’s your rubbing alcohol.

Later I’ll get into how they hide all this stuff. That’s quite an art too. The inmates are pretty clever sometimes. I guess when you have lots of time on your hands you can do about anything.

I also want to write an article on ink making at home, but that will be a later article. See you then and, … take care…