Purple ink on table?? (stain, glass, iron, cold)

[dreamofmonterey]

ok this is weird but I just found purple ink (or something like it) on the wood table- no pens were broken- where on earth does this come from???

[sunsprit]

If it's a stain, there had to be a source.

If not a pen, perhaps a wet page from an inkjet printer was placed on the table.

[Cornerguy1]

Stains can come from all sorts of places.

Placing a frozen loaf of bread on a permeable surface can cause a stain from the ink on the bread wrapper as the loaf thaws.

A damp magazine could tranfer ink from a page to the surface below.

The variables are almost endless.

[garth]

I think the previous posts offer likely possibilities. Here's my take along the same lines.

Did someone use a piece of paper or magazine for a coaster under a cold glass? It's possible as the glass sweated in a humid environment, the water soaked into the underlying paper/magazine. As the paper/magazine got wet, the ink got wet and transferred to the table beneath it.

If it was an earlier decade (ok, a few decades), I might have suggested that it came from a mimeographed page with their purple ink. Remember those? They were the freshly printed pages that the kids got in school from their teacher. As soon as they were passed out, all the kids immediately sniffed the pages. It couldn't be one of those pages, could it?