The two overlapping wings on the back of a Survey Corps jacket are the most worn mark in Attack on Titan. The people who wear them go outside the walls. Everyone else stays in. The wings are a promise about freedom made by the branch that loses most of its members keeping it.
The other recurring marks are just as literal: three walls made of the thing they were built to keep out, nine titans that pass from body to body, and the Rumbling, which the walls existed to threaten. Here is what each means inside the story, and where it turns up across our own Attack on Titan collection.
The Wings of Freedom
Every soldier belongs to one of three branches, each with a crest. The Garrison, which maintains the walls, wears two roses. The Military Police, who serve the king, wear a unicorn. The Survey Corps, who ride beyond the walls to map and fight, wear two wings, one white and one blue, crossed over a shield.
The wings are on the back of the jacket, on the shoulder and on the green cloak, and the back is the side a titan sees. The salute goes with the crest, the right fist pressed over the heart, and the phrase the commander uses to send people out: dedicate your hearts.
They spread across the back of the Freedom Fall tee, sit above a figure on the Freedom Cry tee, and the captain most associated with them carries the Survey Corps Captain Blackout tee.
Wearing the wings
The three walls
Three rings of wall, each around fifty meters high, enclose what the people inside believe is the last of humanity. Maria is the outermost, Rose the middle, Sina the innermost, with the capital at its center. They are named for the three daughters of Ymir Fritz, the first person to hold titan power.
In the year 845 the Colossal Titan kicks open the gate of Shiganshina district on Wall Maria's southern edge, the Armored Titan breaks through the inner gate, and the population retreats behind Wall Rose. What nobody inside knows is what the walls are: the king who built them a century earlier used the Founding Titan to line every wall with hardened Colossal Titans standing shoulder to shoulder inside the stone. The population found out when a crystal shattered a section and a titan's face looked out from the gap.
The Walls Fall tee puts the Colossal Titan over the wall as a full back print, the Wall Shift tee treats it as a broadsheet, and the Colossal Titan two-sided tee gives the titan the chest.
The nine titans
Most titans are mindless. Nine are not. When Ymir Fritz died, her power split into nine titans that have passed from holder to holder for two thousand years: the Founding, the Attack, the Colossal, the Armored, the Female, the Beast, the Jaw, the Cart and the War Hammer. A person carrying one can turn into it at will, and is called a shifter.
A titan is inherited by eating its current holder, and a holder dies thirteen years after inheriting, the length of time Ymir lived after gaining the power. Only Subjects of Ymir, the people the outside world calls Eldians, can become titans at all, and a Pure Titan, the mindless kind, is made by injecting one with titan spinal fluid.
The Colossal is sixty meters tall and its transformation is an explosion. The Armored is plated in hardened skin. The Female can harden selectively and call Pure Titans with a scream. The Jaw is fast and its bite breaks hardening. The Beast is a thrower, and its holder's royal blood matters later. The Titan Destruction tee lines their faces up as a set; the Attack Titan Green Eye tee and the Armored Titan knitted sweater each take one, and the Reiner two-sided tee pairs the Armored Titan with the soldier who carries it.
The nine
The Founding Titan and royal blood
Two of the nine are different in kind. The Founding Titan can command every other titan and rewrite the memories of every Subject of Ymir, but only when its holder has royal blood, or is touching someone who does. The Attack Titan has no special body; its holder can see the memories of the people who will inherit it later. Eren holds both, and the last act is what happens when he finds the royal-blooded contact he needs.
Behind all of it is Ymir Fritz, a slave girl two thousand years earlier who found a spine-like creature in a tree and became the first titan; every titan since comes from that creature. She appears on the Ymir sweatpants, the creature on the Spine tote, and the Founder itself on the Founding Titan tee and the Founding Titan knitted sweater.
The Rumbling
The Rumbling is the threat the walls were built to make. The king who raised them promised the outside world that if the island was ever attacked, the Colossal Titans inside the walls would walk and flatten everything in their path.
Eren carries it out. Using the Founding Titan, he wakes every wall titan at once and sends them across the sea toward the rest of the world, and by the time his former friends stop him, roughly eighty percent of humanity is dead. The walls were never protection. They were a weapon, pointed outward, with the people inside living on top of the trigger.
The Rumbling tee and the Rumbling tote carry the event by name, the Rumbling shorts keep it to a hip print, and the Cataclysm sweatshirt draws the walkers.
Humanity's strongest and the Ackermans
Captain Levi is introduced as humanity's strongest soldier, and the story explains why a man with no titan can outfight people who have one. He is an Ackerman, a family once bred as bodyguards to the royal line and, as a side effect, immune to the Founding Titan's control over memory. When an Ackerman's instinct to protect someone kicks in, the story calls it an awakening, and they fight beyond anyone else without a titan. Mikasa is the other.
The Humanity's Blade Bloodshot tee and the Ackerman tee draw him in full, and the Humanity's Blade Eyes embroidery tee reduces him to the eyes.
Ackerman pieces
How this translates onto cloth
Attack on Titan gives a garment two kinds of image. The wings are a crest, which is what a print does best: high contrast and a clean silhouette. The titans are dense figure work with a lot of gray, so those are kept large, usually as a full back print.
Everything is printed as a bonded matte finish, so a big gray titan sits flat instead of catching the light. Most of the range is the 270gsm garment-washed vintage tee, a relaxed oversized cut that is pre-shrunk; the two knitted sweaters are a 100% cotton knit, and the embroidered tees carry the artwork as thread. Where a design sits is stated on each product page.
Measurements for every size are published on the sizing page in both inches and centimeters, and size exchanges and returns run for 14 days from delivery. The whole set is in the Attack on Titan collection.
Read next: the Brand of Sacrifice and the other Berserk marks, and the Naruto symbols explained.
Torazen designs are independent fan-inspired work — not affiliated with or endorsed by the rights holders. Character and series names are used to describe what the artwork refers to.