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9 photographsArchive Record FUH-YKYX-CBQG-A
Era undetermined
Reference example
This pipe is documented here as an example for study — it is a record in the archive, not an item offered for sale. Everything below is what the piece itself, and the evidence around it, will honestly support.
Original stem
Yes
Faridunhill standing declaration
Stem replaced or re-cut
No
Faridunhill standing declaration
Rim cleaned (no wood removed)
Yes
Faridunhill standing declaration
Refinished
No
Faridunhill standing declaration
Chamber reamed
Yes
Faridunhill standing declaration
Smoked
Yes
owner stated
Facts, not a grade. We do not score a pipe out of ten: a number would rank a restored pipe above an honest one, and restoration is exactly what this hobby prices down. Every line above is checkable by anyone holding the pipe. Lines marked Faridunhill standing declaration rest on our published, dated statement of shop practice (v1.0, 2026-07-29) — not on an inspection of this individual pipe. It is one document, in public, that you can hold us to.
This record documents a Big Ben pipe of the Tattoo Blue line, a straight-shaped estate example of Dutch manufacture. The pipe carries the Big Ben name, one of the principal marques of the Netherlands' pipe industry, and its owner identifies it explicitly as a product of Holland. Over the course of the twentieth century Gubbels grew into the dominant pipe manufacturer in the Netherlands, absorbing other Dutch marques and building Big Ben into an internationally distributed name. The Tattoo series in particular is associated with vivid, contemporary colour finishes, and the Blue designation of this example places it within that decorative programme. The straight configuration seen here is the most fundamental of pipe architectures: bowl, shank, and stem aligned along a single axis, giving a direct draw and a balanced profile. It is a form that appears across every era of the Big Ben catalogue. Dating rests on the identity of the line itself. Big Ben pipes do not carry factory date codes, so a precise year of manufacture cannot be read from the stampings of any given example. The Tattoo series belongs to the brand's modern output, and the pipe's estate status confirms only that it passed through prior ownership and use. On that basis the honest conclusion is a bracket of late twentieth to early twenty-first century production, with the exact year left open pending further documentary evidence.
2024-04-11
Logged from the Faridunhill archive — photographed and posted on Instagram, 2024-04-11.
2025-04-04
Sold through Etsy for USD 33. No buyer is recorded.
2026-07-29
5 checklist facts recorded under Faridunhill's standing declaration of shop practice (2026-07-29).
2026-08-28
Honesty pass: statements the source does not support were removed (era 'modern production, late 20th to ' -> undetermined).
2026-08-28
Honesty pass: statements the source does not support were removed (2 unsupported/absence sentence(s) removed from the essay).
This record is append-only. Nothing is deleted — a correction is a new entry that supersedes the old one, and both stay visible.
USD 33sold 2025-04-04 · Etsy
From 1 recorded sale — this pipe, this day. A single transaction is not a market price, and we will never print one as if it were.
The sample this sits in: Faridunhill has recorded 53 sales of Big Ben between 2015–2026 — median $60, most falling between $20 and $135.
The date shown is the date of sale, not the date this page was published. Our own transaction record, published free. No buyer appears here — not a name, not initials, not a country. Counted across both of our channels — eBay 2015–2022 and Etsy 2022–2026 — so the series is continuous and a change of marketplace is never read as a change in price.
Nobody leaves empty-handed. If you hold the catalogue page, the dated advertisement, or a hallmarked sibling that closes one of these — or simply own this model and can measure yours — send it in. Contributions are checked, credited to you by name, and the record is updated with the date it changed.
Instagram post, 2024-04-11. Published to a third-party platform on that date and archived since — a timestamp we cannot move. It is evidence that this object existed and looked like this, then.
The photographs are the identity. 9 images of this pipe's grain, stamping and stem are held as its fingerprint. The handle above is only a handle: lose it, and the pipe can still be matched back to this record from its grain.