I apologize if this is the wrong place to be asking this question.
I was watching Deadwood tonight, and in the first episode of season 3 Charlie Utter glances at a note he has scrawled onto his palm.
Now, Deadwood is set in the 1870s, and it looks like the ballpoint pen was not patented until 1888. Based on that it seems unlikely that someone in the comparatively remote frontier of Deadwood would be using a ballpoint pen to scrawl a note on their hand.
So this got me to wondering: Was this just an anachronistic goof on the part of the show-runners or were there other ink tools (and I'm assuming a fountain pen or quill pen would be too sharp) that a cowboy could use to jot down notes on their skin back then?
(and I'm assuming a fountain pen or quill pen would be too sharp)
No, neither of them is particularly sharp and you generally use less pressure to write with one than you do with a ball point pen. You are just applying a thin line of ink to a surface. Fountain pens were expensive though and quill pens (made by cutting and shaping the quill end of a large feather) had, by the 1870s, been replaced by steel nib pens. That is a replaceable steel nib attached to the end of a shaped pen (basically a short stick a bit longer than a ball point pen), that you dip into an inkwell and then write.
Anyone who went to school in the 1950s - 1960s can tell you that there is no problem writing on your skin with either a steel nib pen or a fountain pen so long as you give the ink a few moments to dry before smearing it.