The Jay

Sometimes a customer comes to me with a very clear idea about what their guitar should be. This can be about the wood they would like or the sound of course, it can be a certain neck shape and fingerboard width or other features like a bevel, soundport, maybe an unusual model like a 12 fret small Jumbo.
They all have their different stories and I love to get to know the people and the stories and maybe be able to take a little of that story and put it into the guitar I am going to build.

The customer of this guitar told me he would like it to have a birds name (I sometimes gave bird names to some of my guitars). The name should be "The Jay".
The background for that was his first and surname begin with the letter "J". This letter is a continuing, lets call it theme, for his life and family. Obviously the bird "Jay" and the letter "J" are spelled the same but also his girlfriends name starts with the letter "Y". So the J a(nd) Y had even more dimensions to it. 
After meeting and chating and a few emails we decided that the letter J should also occur somewhere on the guitar. My immediate idea was to inlay the letter into the fretboard, maybe at the 12th fret, something like that. So when I prepared the fingerboard and cut the slots I tryed to visualize this letter. I could not come up with an idea how to incorporate it in a way it looks fitting. 
But I remembred the distinct look of the bird the jay with its characteristic feathers. An ideal image for an inlay. 
A Jay resting on a J for the guitar "The JAY".