One of the pens I’ve been most interested in trying since I first got into fountain pens was the Sailor Pro Gear Slim. For one thing, I was intrigued by the famous Sailor feedback, and for another… well, they’re just really pretty pens that come in an endless array of colours and editions. 

I was definitely starting to feel a bit of fountain pen FOMO over not having tried one out, but since that’s a terrible reason to buy an extremely expensive pen, I’d been resisting for a while. But then I spotted the Grateful Crane edition from the Shikiori Japanese Fairy Tales range for an amazing price on eBay, and I could resist no longer! 

I’d actually had my eye on two of the other Japanese Fairy Tale pens for a while: the Dragon Palace edition (a beautiful mint green) and Princess Kaguya (bright red). Both looked to have a subtle gold sparkle to them in the promotional images, which I really liked. I hadn’t thought too much about the Grateful Crane edition until this one came up, as it seemed a little more muted, but the beautiful powder blue colour definitely started to grow on me, the longer I looked at it. 

I ended up getting this pen for less than half the retail price, and it looks brand new, other than a small ink mark on the back of the grip section (which the seller had included in the listing, so it wasn’t a surprise!). And I was really blown away when it arrived by how pretty it was in real life! As I’ve said, in the images it looked like it didn’t have the same sparkle as the other Fairy Tale pens, so I was delighted to find that it does have a beautiful silver shimmer to it that really compliments the pastel blue colour. 

The golden central band on the cap also has a beige strip in the centre of it that I hadn’t noticed on the images, but it makes a nice accent detail alongside the gold hardware and the classic Sailor anchor finial. 

The Fairy Tale Pro Gear Slims only come with a 14k Medium Fine nib, but I didn’t mind that. Medium Fine seems to be an exclusive Sailor thing, from what I’ve seen, so I was intrigued to see how it compared to the Fine nibs on my other Japanese pens. 

I inked the pen up with a Cult Pens Exclusive ink by Diamine, Bashful Blueberry, and whilst I like the combination, I’m still on the lookout for the perfect ink match for this pen! As soon as I put the nib to the paper though, I could understand exactly what people have been saying about Sailor nibs. It writes unlike any of my other pens, and to be honest, I wasn’t initially sure how much I liked it. 

It feels like writing with a very sharp pencil, and it sounds like it too, having a satisfying scratch as the pen moves across the page. The nib certainly doesn’t glide across the page like a Pilot nib, so you can barely feel it. It’s a very tactile experience, and one that’s grown on me a lot over the couple of weeks I’ve been using it. 

Now that I’m more accustomed to it, I find that I really like it, and how different the experience is to writing with any of my other pens. I’m also really liking the Medium Fine nib. It appears to me to be similar to a Fine nib on some of my European pens (like my Kawecos), and it has so far been a very consistent writer, with no hard starts or skipping. 

It’s also very lightweight, and fits my hand well, although I can see why people with bigger hands might find the Pro Gear Slims a bit too small and slim. Personally I don’t mind slimmer pens, but I’d definitely be interested to try the full-sized Pro Gear sometime for comparison.

Overall though, I really like this pen, and I’m glad to have it in my collection. And not just because of fountain pen FOMO! I like how unique this pen feels to write with, and the Grateful Crane colour is incredibly pretty. This is definitely one of the pens in my collection I could just sit and look at, watching the sparkles catch the light!

It almost seems dangerous though that I ended up liking this pen so much, since Sailor are the kings of new, limited and special editions, and I’m exactly the sort of person who gets sucked in by that sort of thing! I’m hoping to resist ending up with a whole fleet of Sailor pens, but we’ll see!

So do you like the Sailor Pro Gear Slim? What do you think of the writing experience?