Blue Nose Submarine Arctic Circle Patch

USS Skate surfaced through the polar ice on March 17, 1959, and proved the Arctic was a submariner's ocean. Nautilus had crossed beneath the North Pole the summer before, and between the two boats the Navy claimed the high north inside a single year. Sailors who cross the Arctic Circle join the Order of the Blue Nose, the fleet's old unofficial honor for entering those latitudes. This five inch patch commemorates the crossing the way the crews remember it, ice, aurora, and all.

The Blue Nose ceremony is the northern cousin of the equator's Shellback rite. King Polar Bear is piped aboard at the limit of his domain, the uninitiated red noses answer to the court of Boreas Rex, and the certificate that follows tends to get framed rather than filed. Arctic tasking has always been scarce, which keeps the honor scarce with it. Through the Cold War the boats ran under-ice transits that the rest of the fleet only read about afterward, and Arctic exercises have brought surface ships back to those latitudes in recent years.

The design covers the whole scene in five inches. Green and pink aurora rolls across a dark blue night sky under Arctic Circle in white block letters. A gray submarine surfaces through the ice field at the center, sail and bow planes breaking clear, while a polar bear crosses the floe in the foreground. Blue Nose anchors the bottom in pink letters with black shadowing, and a white merrowed border finishes the edge. The backing is iron-on, and it sews on just as well.

Every element on the patch is something a Blue Nose sailor actually saw or steamed through, the ice, the animal traffic, the sky doing things it never does at home. That is what separates this design from generic submarine insignia. It reads like a logbook entry from above 66.5 north, and to the sailors who were there it reads instantly.

Wear it on a flight jacket, cruise vest, or sea bag, or frame it beside the Blue Nose certificate it pairs with. It also makes a strong marker in a shadow box among duty station patches. A cold crossing deserves to be visible.