What to Engrave on a Pet Memorial Wind Chime
There's a plant in my backyard that blooms once a year. When it does, I stop what I'm doing and I think about Rubble.
He was my soul dog. Not my favorite in a casual way — the one. He knew my routine before I did. He anticipated my steps. I could look at him and we'd understand each other without either of us making a sound. Anyone who has had that kind of animal knows exactly what I mean, and anyone who hasn't will think I'm being dramatic. I stopped trying to explain it to the second group a long time ago.
He was my son's childhood dog too. I had a painting made of Rubble looking out the window and gave it to my son, because that was the view he grew up seeing.
I still have his collar. His bandana. His leash.
What I don't have is his ashes.
I didn't make wind chimes then. Love Chimes didn't exist yet. If it had, there would be a chime hanging in my backyard right now with his essence inside it, and I would hear him every time the wind moved. Instead I have a plant that blooms once a year. I'm grateful for it. It isn't the same thing.
So when someone asks me what to engrave on a pet memorial wind chime, I'm not answering as a maker. I'm answering as someone who would give a great deal to have had the chance.
Here's what I've learned.
Start with what you'd say, not what sounds right
Most people come to me trying to summarize an entire life in a handful of words, and they freeze. It's the same paralysis as a blank condolence card, except this one is permanent, and that makes it worse.
So don't start there. Start smaller.
If your dog walked into the room right now and you had ten seconds, what would you say?
It's almost never a summary. It's usually something plain — good boy, thank you, I'm sorry I wasn't there, you were the best thing. Those are the words that hold up over years, because they're true rather than composed.
The engravings that age badly are the ones written to sound like a memorial. The ones that age well are the ones you'd actually say out loud.
Five words that ring
Here's the thing nobody tells you, and it changes the whole question.
Every Love Chime has exactly five chimes. Not four, not six — five, every time. And the engraving space on each one holds about five inches of text, which in practice is roughly one word.
So you're not writing a paragraph. You're choosing five words, and each one gets its own chime, and each one rings on its own.
Say it out loud and you'll feel why that matters:
Rubble. Good. Boy. Always. Home.
That's not a limitation. That's a form — closer to a poem than an inscription. And it's a far kinder question to sit with than "summarize your dog." Five words. Any five. They don't have to be a sentence.
Some people use all five for one phrase. Some use one chime for the name and leave the others for words that only mean something to them. There's no wrong arrangement, because there's no template — we size the font to the word rather than making your word fit a font.
Where else the words can go
The chimes aren't the only surface. There are four places on a Love Chime that take engraving:
The wooden topper — the piece at the top that holds everything
The epoxy striker — the center piece that catches the wind, engraved in the epoxy field itself
The aluminum sail — the flat piece below the striker
Each of the five chimes — about one word each
That's eight distinct engravable surfaces on one object.
Capacity on the topper and the sail isn't a fixed number, and I won't pretend otherwise. It depends entirely on the design we build together — we adjust font sizes, spacing and layout around what you want to say. If your words run long, tell me. We'll find the arrangement that holds them. That's the whole point of it being made by hand rather than ordered from a menu.
Every chime is 36 inches, hand-cut, hand-polished and hand-assembled. Full sizing and pricing is on the pricing and size page.
What people choose
After enough of these, the requests fall into recognizable shapes.
Their name, and nothing else. More common than you'd expect, and more powerful than people anticipate. A name in aluminium, moving in the wind. It doesn't need help.
Their name and their years. The most-requested version overall. Some people want full dates. Some want only the years. Some deliberately leave off the second date because they aren't ready to see it, and that is a completely legitimate choice.
The thing you always said to them. The greeting at the door. The nickname nobody else used. The phrase you said in the voice you only used with them. This is the one that undoes people when they open the box.
The thing only you would know. Where they slept. What they stole. The one command they never once obeyed in their entire life. Specificity is the whole difference between a memorial and a template.
A line about where they are now. Run free. Off the leash at last. Waiting at the door. These are well-worn, and that isn't a criticism — they're worn because they work, and a grieving person doesn't need originality, they need something that fits.
I'll be honest with you about something. We've engraved a lot of chimes, but the lines I could quote you came from other kinds of loss and other kinds of love — Rooted in Love on a family tree chime, Devoted, You've never failed me yet. Beautiful words, but they belong to somebody else's story.
Your dog deserves their own five words. Not mine, and not a list you found on the internet.
What can go inside, besides words
Engraving isn't the only way to hold onto them. The epoxy striker can carry something physical.
A lock of fur works. It sets into the epoxy and stays there.
Ashes work, if you have them.
A keepsake works, within limits — it needs to be less than four inches wide, about an inch thick, and able to take a small hole drilled through the middle, because that's how it hangs. A tag. A charm. A small piece of something that was theirs.
A printed photo works, with one condition: it has to be laminated before it goes into the epoxy, and you shouldn't hang that chime in direct sun. Photos fade. I'd rather tell you that now than have you discover it in two summers.
Anything else — genuinely, ask. Almost anything can go into epoxy, but not everything, and the ones that fail tend to fail slowly and permanently. So if you bring me something I haven't set before, I research how that specific material reacts with epoxy before we commit to it. I'm not going to seal something irreplaceable into resin and hope.
This part matters more than people expect, because for a lot of us the words aren't the hard part. The hard part is a box in a closet holding a collar, a bandana and a leash, and no idea what any of it is for now.
Things worth thinking through first
I want to be clear: we don't talk anyone out of anything. It's your dog and your words. You can have whatever you want, as long as you approve the design before we build it.
These are just the things people find useful to think about beforehand.
Long passages lose their power. A full poem across the chimes reads beautifully on paper and disappears on an object hanging in a garden. Two words that land will outperform twelve that don't.
Sit with the date for a day. Some people want the date of loss on it immediately. Some find later that it becomes the only thing they see. There's no wrong answer, but it can't be undone, so it's worth one night's thought.
Your own name changes the object.Mom's good boy is a different thing than Good boy. One memorialises the dog. The other memorialises the relationship. Both are right — they just aren't the same, and it helps to know which one you're making.
Say it plainly. The most affecting chimes are almost never the most poetic ones. They're the ones where somebody wrote down exactly what they meant and didn't dress it up.
If you don't have their ashes
I want to say this directly, because I'm in it.
You do not need ashes to make something that holds them.
Plenty of people don't have them. The vet handled it. It was sudden. You made a decision in a hallway at eleven at night and nobody offered, and by the time you thought to ask, it was too late. That was my situation with Rubble, and there is no version of this where I get to go back and choose differently.
A chime without ashes is not a lesser chime. The words are the thing. The fur is the thing. Their name in the wind is the thing.
If you do have ashes and want them inside, that's possible, and there's a whole page explaining how we handle it — carefully, and with more respect than you're probably braced for. But if you don't, you haven't missed your chance. You just hold onto them a different way.
Why a chime, and not a plaque
Every Love Chime is precision cut to 528 Hz, the Love Frequency.
I could give you the technical version. Here's the honest one instead: a plaque sits on a shelf and waits for you to look at it. A chime finds you. You'll be washing dishes, or pulling into the driveway, or standing in the yard not thinking about anything at all, and the wind will move — and there they are.
That's not a memorial you visit. That's one that visits you.
Which is exactly what I wanted for Rubble, and exactly what I didn't get.
You might also want to read about what it means to lose a soul animal.
Rubble's plant bloomed again this year. I still don't have a chime for him. But every one I make for someone else's dog is, in some small way, the one I didn't get to make for mine.
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