A page a day
Each attempt is dated and filed, and none of them quietly vanish. Nothing is scored and the ugly ones are the ones worth keeping. After a fortnight the book reads like a handwriting sample taken under duress.
One word · fifteen seconds · no looking
Some drawings only get honest in the dark.
You are handed a word and a quarter of a minute. Then the page goes black. No line to follow, no wobble to correct on the way past — only the shape you believe your hand is making. Have a go right here.
15
Keep going · you can't see it
Your word
lighthouse
Fifteen seconds from the moment you press. Draw with the mouse or a finger — the page goes dark either way.
What comes out is never what you planned. That is the entire point.
What's inside
1
2
3
4
Four ways to embarrass your own hand
Pass it around
Give the phone to whoever is beside you. Their word appears only under a fingertip, so the table stays in the dark, they draw blind, and the next person has to name the wreckage. Points both ways. It gets noisy fast.
Read your own hand
Weeks on, the book puts an old page in front of you with the word stripped out and asks what it was meant to be. Failing to identify your own drawing happens far more often than pride allows, and the tally is kept.
Your hand has a tell
With nothing to aim at, every hand slides the same way each time — a bit left, a bit high, a bit small. The book learns yours from page one and can drop any drawing back where you intended it. About half become recognisable the instant it does.
Privacy policy · in force 26 July 2026 · iPhone and iPad
The book is yours and it stays shut
Bad drawings are personal in a way finished ones never are. None of them go anywhere.
Nothing is collected and nothing is sent. There is no account, no feed, no leaderboard beyond the one on your own screen, and no server anywhere behind this app. Your pages, your words, your scores and the measurements taken from your hand live on your device and end there.
The book opens on a blank page. There is no registration, no username and no password, and you are never asked for a name, an email address, an age or a location. Device and advertising identifiers go untouched.
Drawings, prompt words, dates, guesses, scores and everything the book works out from them are written into its own storage on your hardware.
No duplicate exists anywhere else. Nobody at this end has ever seen a page of yours and there is no copy here to look at, hand over or lose.
The party mode runs entirely on the single handset being passed between players. Nothing is paired, no nearby devices are scanned, no Bluetooth or local network is used, and no other phone is contacted at any point. Everyone plays on one screen because that is the only place the game exists.
To move a drawing back where you meant it, the book builds a small profile of how your hand drifts when it cannot see — the usual offset, the usual scale. That is a description of how you move, so it is worth being plain about it: the profile is calculated on the device, from your own pages, kept there, and transmitted to nobody. It is never treated as an identifier and is deleted with the app.
How often you recognise your own work, how the scores fall in a group, how many pages you have filled — all of it is arithmetic done on your phone and shown to you alone. It is a feature, not a report. No usage figures, session logs or diagnostics are gathered here.
If you decide a drawing deserves an audience, iOS's share sheet exports it at the moment you ask and not before. Where it goes next is between you and whatever app received it, under that app's rules.
No analytics package, advertising network, crash reporter or tracking pixel is built into the app. Nothing observes how you draw, and there is no partner on the other end of anything.
The passing game tends to attract younger players, so it is worth stating plainly: nothing leaves any device, including theirs. No record exists on our side that COPPA, the UK Children's code or comparable rules elsewhere could apply to.
Any page can be thrown away from inside the app whenever you like, and the app never removes one on its own. Deleting Ink Hand Diary takes the whole book with it for good, with nothing archived at this end to bring back.
Worth knowing: with iCloud or computer backups switched on, the book may sit inside that encrypted backup, which belongs to you and falls under Apple's terms rather than this page.
Should a later version behave in a way this page does not cover, the page is rewritten before that version ships and the date at the top moves with it.
Send them to dnsvsnv@gmail.com.
Contact
Write in
A fault, a prompt word that keeps producing nonsense, a rule the passing game handles badly, or a page you are unreasonably proud of. It reaches one person.
- Developer
- Brynn Finley
- dnsvsnv@gmail.com
- Reply
- A day or two, usually.
Bring a steady hand. You will not be using it.