Scottie Piersel: Sandblasted Pencil Shank Tomato with Ivorite Tobacco Pipe

Scottie Piersel's pencil-shanked pipes are among the most recognizable smoking instruments available, the American artisan's signature aesthetic dramatizing the relational proportions between bowl and shank. It's a optical illusion of sorts: the impossibly slender shank seemingly unfit to support such a comparatively massive bowl. Scottie's renowned engineering, though, makes such a feat possible. Despite being shaped to such a narrow diameter, each of her pencil shanks is lined with a stainless steel tube from transition to shank end, fitting the stem via a reverse tenon and ensuring the utmost strength and durability. This Tomato might seem delicate, but it's anything but — the steel reinforcement promising lifelong reliability and enabling hands-free enjoyment.

Length-wise, this offering is fairly balanced between bowl and shank compared to Scottie's more regularly produced, lengthy iterations. In fact, because of the bowl's extra-squat and broad nature, the shank is just a touch longer than the bowl is wide. Such proportions also result in a chamber of Pot-like dimensions taken to the extreme: its breadth greater than its depth. In profile, the bowl evokes a stout cauldron, its rounded base tapering slightly toward the rim before straightening into a slight lip that, then, leads into the rim's inward chamfer. Finished smooth and in a mahogany stain, the rim contrasts against the rest of the stummel's sandblast, and the palette's contrast is furthered by an Ivorite ring at the shank end and one of Scottie's signature uses of brindled vulcanite stems.