Early modern women, in their roles as domestic alchemists, recorded recipes for making ink alongside recipes for household remedies and foodstuffs. In making ink, they provided themselves and their families with one of the important elements required for developing written literacy. Experimenting with the basic ingredients of early modern ink—oak galls, iron sulphate, gum arabic, and water—the women often altered methods for making ink, working around the availability of equipment, time, and money. These recipes provide evidence of experimentation where several key additions to the basic recipe, such as vinegar and alcohol, were added in order to preserve the ink and protect it from the effects of environmental fluctuations. Ink’s natural properties render its permanence precarious, as were the lives and livelihoods of the laborers involved in procuring its ingredients. Ink making required a knowledge of papermaking: ensuring the natural elements of both ink and paper worked together was crucial in creating the optimal writing environment. It is, in large part, down to the trial and error of early modern women making ink at home that their manuscripts endure. Early modern poets, such as Lady Anne Southwell, understood the fraught properties of ink and its multilayered creative possibilities, using it as a poetic metaphor for memorial.