A coat of arms, more properly called an armorial achievement, armorial bearings, or often just arms for short, in European tradition, is a design belonging to a particular person (or group of people) and used by them in a wide variety of ways.

In the heraldic traditions of England and Scotland an individual, rather than a family, had a coat of arms. In those traditions coats of arms are legal property transmitted from father to son; wives and daughters could also bear arms modified to indicate their relation to the current holder of the arms.