I decided a while ago that Topaz needed a coat of arms, and finally got around to getting one designed!

I knew roughly what I wanted for it, and after a bit of searching, I found a great-looking panther design for heraldry for sale. My boyfriend helped with laying everything out with a mockup as a good starting point.
Next step was finding someone who could do a silhouette of Topaz's sword, and put the design together.

did a great job on it, I'm super happy with how it turned out.

It even follows the real-world rules of heraldry, in terms of details and colours! The standard is large enough to be distinguishable from a distance, and the colours are chosen very deliberately since colours (red, green, purple, black, blue, etc) cannot be on top of other colours, but must be on top of metals (white/silver, yellow/gold).