A system and method for compressing digital pen stroke data utilizing curve simplification. Digital pen stroke images (ink images) generate a relatively large amount of data to preserve the ink image generated on a device. Current ink compression algorithms utilize lossless compression algorithm that have limited success. The invention provides a lossy compression algorithm to reduce the amount of data required to store and transmit ink data. The invention utilizes a two-part algorithm to reduce and compress the number of data points representing the ink data. The invention also utilizes curve splines to reconstruct and smooth the lossy ink data image.