Kenilworth II — Maple Burl & Ocean Resin | Tapa Traveller Edition

f you were going to make a pen that tells the story of the great Polynesian navigators, you'd want it to look like the sea. And somehow, that's exactly what this one does.

The barrel is a wood-resin hybrid that genuinely takes your breath away — the lower section is pale golden maple burl, its fine parallel grain lines running clean and straight like the planks of a voyaging canoe, warm and honeyed and beautifully tactile. Then, somewhere around the mid-point of the barrel, the wood gives way to a pour of the most extraordinary ocean resin: deep Pacific blue swirling into turquoise and teal, with pale aquamarine eddies churning through it like the wake of a hull cutting through open water. It looks less like a material and more like a window into the sea itself.

The pairing with the Tapa Traveller kit feels almost inevitable. Every detail of the chrome metalwork carries the story of those remarkable Polynesian seafarers who navigated thousands of miles of open Pacific with nothing but stars, swells and accumulated wisdom. The petroglyph warrior on the end cap speaks to the Marquesan and Tahitian roots of the journey. The double rows of triangles running the length of the clip chart the path across the ocean — and on this pen, with that blue resin beneath, those navigational marks feel genuinely alive. The Tapa-style bands at the centre and lower barrel echo the cloth beaten from paper mulberry and breadfruit bark by the early Hawaiian islanders, intricate patterns pressed into metal and polished to a shine.

It's a pen built around one of history's greatest stories of human endeavour, and the material couldn't suit it better.

Hand-turned and finished in the West Midlands, presented in a gift box.

A10