Grail: Fountain Pens & Inks

See what is inked right now, how long each fill has lasted, and which bottle deserves the next page. Every fill becomes a durable record.

Grail is a ledger for people who write with fountain pens. It keeps track of the pens you own, the inks on your shelf, and the pairings that are inked right now.

CURRENTLY INKED Open Grail and see your rotation at a glance: every pen that holds ink, the ink it holds, and how many days it has been filled. Tap Clean when you flush a pen and the fill moves into your history with a care record. Changed your mind? Undo is one tap away.

PENS Each record is one physical pen: maker, model, exact variant, finish, filling system, and the nib that is installed. Pick from a catalog of more than 5,700 models across 45 makers and the factory nib options fill in for you; type anything the catalog does not know. Pens without a photo show a quiet maker monogram with a stripe in the finish color you describe, so a mixed cabinet still lines up. Record what you paid and Grail shows what your cabinet is worth, one total per currency.

INKS An ink is a color; the bottles, samples, and cartridge packs are containers under it. Drag a level slider as a bottle empties, and Grail celebrates the day you finally write one dry. Catalog inks bring an approximate swatch and their formula notes, and swatches behave like the ink: shading inks pool, sheening inks glint, shimmer inks twinkle.

HISTORY Every fill is kept: pen, nib, ink, container, dates, your notes about paper and behavior, a writing sample photo, and a rating so you remember which pairings you loved.

CARE Flushes are logged automatically when you clean a pen. Add deep cleans, nib work, and repairs yourself, with the date, who did the work, and what it cost.

SURPRISE ME Out of ideas? Grail proposes a pen-and-ink pairing you have not tried.

MADE FOR THE HOBBY • Accent themes named after real inks, a color wheel, "Use as Accent" on any bottle you own, and "Follow my ink", which tints the app with the ink in your latest fill. • Nine papers: Tomoe River, Rhodia, Midori MD, Leuchtturm1917, Clairefontaine, Kokuyo Campus, Mnemosyne, Stalogy 365, and plain white. • Three title typefaces, card or list layouts, and a dashboard you can trim to taste. • Japanese names beside romanized Iroshizuku, Sailor, and Platinum inks. • English, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, German, Spanish, and French.

YOUR DATA STAYS YOURS Grail stores everything on your device. When you are signed in to iCloud, it also mirrors your records to your private iCloud database so your iPhone and iPad stay in step; to keep a library on one device only, turn Grail off under iCloud in Settings. There is no account, no tracking, and no analytics. Export your library as a JSON archive with photos (up to 2,000 records and 8 MiB of photos) and merge it back in later; every import is previewed first, and deletions are remembered so an old archive cannot resurrect what you removed.