Side-Blown Shofar with a Flourish

I have written about side-blown shofarot in Chapter 3-14   "Blow it as it Grows: Can a side-blown horn be a shofar?" of my book, Hearing Shofar: The Still Small Voice of the Ram's Horn. In the side-blown instruments I have made, I have left the tip of the horn in its natural state to preserve the natural form of the horn. I am delighted to see, however, that another horner has taken a different approach:

As shown at http://shofars.us/, the tip of the horn has been carved to form the Hebrew letter ש, "shin" or "sheen".

Shin is often used in Jewish symbolism, such as on a mezuzah case, to represent the word Shaddai, a name for God. During the priestly blessings, the priest would hold his hands in a form representative of shin. It can also stand for "shema," the word for "listen," an especially significant act when it comes to shofar.

While the simpleness of an un-adorn shofar has symbolic meaning, decorating a horn can be an expression of hiddur mitzvah, the mitzvah of making a mitzvah-object beautiful.