Scribal penmanship

[-JKP-]

Here's a quick example of what happens when you push against the direction of the quill.

One of the reason the tails (connected macrons) in medieval scripts are generally added in a separate stroke is because the scribe re-aligns the quill to pull it in the correct direction for dispensing the ink.

If you don't do that, the tip jitters and the ink splats.

This scribe apparently didn't want to lift the pen to add the tails in a separate stroke. He reversed direction and drew upwards and back and the ink feathered out and splashed. I don't see this very often in manuscripts so I thought I'd post it for general information of something that is unconventional: