Designing tattoos for my brother's guitar...

For those who've visited my guitar page, you know that my Uncle Kenny can do spectacular things with wood. My page emphasizes the archtops because that's what I play.

My brother is getting his turn, having a steel string flat top made, and I enlisted to help with the inlay designs. For whatever reason, he wanted oak leaves and acorns, and I came up with some stuff along those lines. I also worked with some Celtic knots and made a Celtic cross with knots. Since the line art doesn't really show well, I faked some 'shell' material from some marble, placed the designs on burl for the headstock stuff and on a dark grained wood for the fingerboard inlays. It's not the whole neck, just an image of what might go between the frets at a given juncture.



I haven't heard back yet to find out what he thinks of the designs. The idea is to make them personal, and since I don't know why he's hooked on oak (not an instrument wood typically), it's maybe a little tricky to get a handle on it. It's like designing a tattoo for someone, if you think of something way cooler after it's done, too bad, maybe next guitar.

Having a fine handmade guitar isn't an everyday sort of thing. Having a fine luthier in the family adds a whole other dimension. My guitar isn't just a prize possession, it's an heirloom and I'll haunt anyone who lets it out of the family. That's why the 'M' inlays for the fingerboard. I think he's going to go for the 'McBride' arching over the top of the headstock, something I'd designed for my archtop. Kenny was so in love with that he put it on a banjo he'd made 25 years ago.

The wee thing, by the way, is an acorn meant to be in scale with the oak leaves for the finger rest. The idea being that the leaves would be maybe the 5th and 12th position markers and the acorns could go in 1st, 3rd and 7th position. Not only does it maintain a fairly natural scale but it functions as a dot inlay. Kenny blew me away with the bees on my fingerrest, he even made little inlaid eyes on them, so I'm pretty sure I'm not reaching beyond his ability.



The green of the leaves is problematic. Getting reds, greens, purples out of shell is not only tricky but when sanding down, those micro-thin layers of color come off. Sometimes the layer underneath is a totally different color, which is how I ended up with gold and silver apples on my tailpiece when Kenny was going for red and green (if memory serves). There's laminate products made from shell that can give you consistent color, but it depends on your temperament whether you think that's organic enough for a handmade instrument.