Guitar Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a guitar tattoo means

A guitar tattoo is almost never about music in general. A note or a clef stands for a song, while an instrument stands for the hands that played it, and most guitar pieces are portraits of a player: the wearer, or someone they have lost. That changes what matters. The right body shape and headstock for a real guitar count for more than any symbolism.

Plenty are portraits of one guitar in particular, because players name their instruments and wear them out. Willie Nelson's classical guitar Trigger has a hole worn clean through its top beside the sound hole. BB King named his guitars Lucille after a 1949 dance-hall fire in Twist, Arkansas: two men fighting over a woman called Lucille started the blaze, and King ran back into the burning building for his guitar. A tattoo of a specific instrument should be drawn from photographs of it, scars included.

The kind of guitar says which music. A classical or flamenco guitar, round sound hole and nylon strings, with a tap plate on the flamenco version, belongs to Spain. A steel-string acoustic belongs to folk and country, a hollow-body archtop with f-holes to jazz, a solid-body electric to blues and rock, and a Flying V to hard rock and metal. Pick the wrong body and a jazz player's memorial becomes a rock tattoo.

Fire and wreckage have their own history. Pete Townshend of The Who began smashing guitars on stage in 1964, and Jimi Hendrix set his Stratocaster alight at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, so a burning or broken guitar on skin quotes that moment of excess rather than any song. The winged guitar is its quiet opposite and usually a memorial for a musician. A guitar with a rosary hanging from the headstock, drawn in soft single-needle black and grey, ties the instrument to faith and family in the Chicano tradition.

Where the design comes from

The modern guitar has a short and well-documented history. Antonio de Torres, working in Seville and Almería in the middle of the nineteenth century, fixed the classical guitar's larger body and fan bracing, and every nylon-string guitar since descends from his. Steel strings and the big flat-top body came from American makers, Martin above all. Gibson's L-5 of the early 1920s put f-holes on a carved archtop for jazz; the solid-body electric arrived with Fender's Telecaster at the start of the 1950s and the Gibson Les Paul in 1952; and the set of shapes was complete by 1958, when Gibson released the Flying V and the Explorer. Painters had claimed the guitar as an object long before tattooists did. Picasso painted The Old Guitarist in 1903 and 1904, and in 1912 he built a guitar out of cardboard that the Museum of Modern Art in New York now owns, one of the cubist constructions that turned the instrument into flat planes and arcs.

Choosing yours

• Draw a real guitar or none. Players notice at once when the body, the headstock and the hardware come from three different instruments, and they will count the strings against the tuning pegs: six of each on a standard guitar, three a side or six in a line depending on the maker. Work from a photograph of the model you mean, or of the actual instrument if it belonged to someone.
• Decide which hand it is for. The pickguard sits where the strumming hand strikes, so a guitar built for a left-handed player is mirrored, pickguard and all, and a stock reference is almost always right-handed. If the tattoo is a portrait of a left-handed player's instrument, say so at the consultation, and if you play, hold your own guitar against the drawing.
• Strings are the ageing problem. Six fine parallel lines running the length of the neck are exactly what spreads together first, and on a small guitar they turn into a grey bar over the years. Below about 10 cm, draw fewer strings, leave them off the neck, or let the frets carry the detail; the continuous-line guitar here leaves them out entirely and loses nothing.

Common questions