Don't think that the weird ones are always are generated from the customer's desires. It's amazing what comes out of your brain if you put a pencil into your hand and just let it run wild on a piece of paper and without any agenda. It's not always spectacular, of course - but ocassionally brilliance (albiet wierd brilliance) just flows out.
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Sounds like a great idea. Should easily be adaptable as an image.
Advice: find an artist whose style you LOVE and give him/her some flexibility on the design, and in order to get some detail into the frets and tuners you're going to need to not make it too small.
Certainly as long as the negative space between the coils was being utilized it would be easy enough to avoid the barber pole, Christmas garland confusion. Snakes are great for coverups, too.