materialsInkلوح

West Africa does it as part of learning to read. A Quran board is a wooden tablet — lawh, plural alwah — cut from locally available woods such as mahogany or baobab, on which students copy verses to memorise them. The inks are typically made from natural pigments mixed with charcoal and water, and may include ingredients said to be spiritually important, such as saffron. Once a verse or chapter has been mastered, the writing on the board is washed off and the water collected, and that water is then consumed or used in healing rituals. The practice is documented in Nigeria and Cameroon and among the Hausa and Fulani.

Islamic legal writing draws a fine line through the same act. Summarising how narrow the gap between approved and disapproved practice can be, Remke Kruk notes that dissolving Qur'anic texts written on paper in water is forbidden, while "writing in bowls with ink that is washed off by the water poured into the bowl" is recommended by the well-known Wahhabi-oriented cleric Wahid 'Abd al-Salam Bali. The bowl form persisted: in the Islamic medieval period, talismanic bowls, most often made of metal rather than clay, were covered in Arabic script, usually Qur'anic verses or a hadith, and were most often used for healing by drinking the water left in them overnight.

One famous neighbour is not part of this. The Ethiopian talismanic scroll, the other great written-charm tradition of the region, is made of parchment and pigment and is used by being read aloud to the afflicted by a third party literate in Ge'ez, or draped around the body — the account read here records no washing and no drinking. This atlas names the absence rather than assuming the practice crossed the Red Sea.

Mesopotamia wrote inward. Incantation bowls were usually inscribed in a spiral, beginning at the rim and moving toward the centre, most of them in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, from the sixth to the eighth centuries. An estimated ten per cent are not written in any real language but in pseudo-script, thought to be forgeries by illiterate scribes sold to illiterate clients — a fact that says something plain about how the writing was read.

China made illegibility the credential. Fulu are asemic Taoist talismanic scripts, painted on talismans by priests; Ge Hong noted in the Baopuzi, in the Eastern Jin, that so long as the inscription was correct, successful use did not depend on the user being able to decipher it. Yang Zhaohua records that early talismans were simple and legible and later ones deliberately cryptic in order to signal their divinity; James Robson, Gil Raz and Ge Zhaoguang all treat the incomprehensibility as central to the script's authority, Ge Zhaoguang calling it a linguistic archaism, "a veil of unfathomable otherwordliness". The method of writing the characters passes in secret from a Taoist priest to their disciples, and the ofuda of Japan and the bujeok of Korea are downstream of it.

Inference — ink on a lead sheet lasts two thousand years, ink on a wooden slate lasts until the next bucket of water, and museums are built out of the first case. A survey of written charms assembled from collections will always undercount the second.

Ground, mixed and brushed — onto a board, a bowl's inside, a paper slip, a shirt, or a strip of linen. Egyptian ritual rubrics instruct the practitioner to draw the wedjat eye on linen or papyrus to serve as a temporary amulet, which is the same instruction as a Hausa slate: write it, use it, lose it.

The live argument about ink is chemical and is about the tattooing branch. The European Chemicals Agency has proposed restricting the intentional use or concentration of roughly 4,000 substances in tattoo inks; the EU Observatory for Nanomaterials reports that a number of modern inks contain nanomaterials and raises nanotoxicological concerns; and in October 2024 an analysis in the European Union found that nine out of ten blue and green inks sold were not compliant with the REACH legislation.