Analysis of ballpoint pen inks on questioned documents is often required in the field of forensic analysis to identify the writing implement used in the commitment of a crime. In forensic work, it is thus necessary to identify the manufacturer of the pen or the specific ink product. In this article, a forensic analysis is documented for discrimination of a series of ballpoint pastes to identify the chromatic components used for blue ballpoint pen inks and thus to establish the writing instrument used in a questioned document. To achieve this, data of various adequate techniques have been corroborated: X‐ray fluorescence spectroscopy, ultraviolet–visible–near‐infrared spectrophotometry, in diffuse reflection and transmission modes, completed by trichromatic analyses, and thin layer chromatography. A protocol consisting of four steps has been proposed, in which various components provided by a database of reference dyes are removed, selected, and combined to assess the possible identity of an unknown pen ink paste among a set belonging to the same color pallet. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 40, 169–177, 2015