Smooth Sleeping Blowfish (Fish) (1024) Tobacco Pipe

Nanna Ivarsson is a third-generation master pipe maker whose work is renowned worldwide for its phenomenal smoking qualities and singular interpretation of the Danish style, informed by the stylistic advancements of her father and grandfather and focused through an aesthetic lens entirely her own. Many of Nanna's pipes feature strikingly robust shaping, with thick builds and hearty bowls often showcased within her portfolio. The Sleeping Blowfish — as Nanna and the Ivarssons have called it — is one of Nanna's signature shapes, further stylizing the shape her father helped to popularize and infusing it with a remarkable degree of organicism. This example is an especially organic take on the shape that's truly reminiscent of its namesake, its compact footprint suffused with a striking degree of fluid momentum, despite its slumbering posture. The entirety of this pipe's shape is surrounded by a series of crisp, firm-lined ridges that flow and sinuously wrap around the bowl while framing the shank and defining its outline.

The bowl here is supple and thoroughly rounded, with rich curvature through the walls as they stand atop a curling heel and arc toward a chamfered rim, making for a comfortable feel in hand and lending this pipe a degree of softness at the fore. At the right fore side of the rim, one of this pipe's ridges starts a meandering descent and flows around the right side, rising near the transition and terminating at the left side of the shank. A second ridge starts midway down the bowl almost directly under the first ridge and follows an opposing trajectory, rising very slightly before plunging and lifting at the left flank. These two ridges define an area of briar that pushes out from the bowl to create a fin-like "tail" that visually encircles part of the bowl's right side before flaring to the left: its wrapping structure cradling the plump bowl and keeping the stummel looking balanced. This arrangement of features essentially comprises the shank, unifying it and the bowl in a way that keeps the eye cemented on the stummel thanks to its alluring richness of detail.

The transition is wide and rather nebulous, and its defining line is cinched into the shank and the raised area around its ridges, manifesting as a broad area of hollow-carved cheeking that speaks to the mastery nanna holds over the art of carving. Where the shank's ridges terminate, the briar flares out into a broad, teardrop-like face reminiscent of more archetypal Ivarsson Blowfish renditions, and the edges of this face are rounded by another, softer ridge that further softens this composition. Despite this ostensibly being the face, this pipe's stem actually pairs to the stummel at the aft side, where a ring of brass is inlaid into the briar and sticks out slightly, allowing a sleek and demurely downturned stem of black vulcanite to sturdily push mount for easy disassembly and cleaning. Dressed in a warm, rich contrast stain, the stummel here showcases stunning grain, with the entire left side of the briar displaying a vast ocean of dense birdseye, while the right side features a more central peppering of the grain. The midsection is wrapped with cross grain that follows the shaping of the pipe extremely well, highlighted by the extended portion of the tail on the right side, where birdseye gives way to cross grain with no interruption. Stout and hearty in hand, this pipe is shaped so masterfully and displays such incredible grain that it's earned Nanna's Fish grade, designating only her best work.