Bar Sinister

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• World Witches: Both Mio Sakamoto's eyepatch and emblem feature a blue bende sinister. It has nothing to do with her parentage, but rather being a reference to Walter Scott's pictorial shorthand for a tough military organization.

• Bar Sinister: The comic by Mike Grell is about a genetically altered superhero team that people derogatorily refer to as half-breeds. The first issue's cover is based on the Bar Sinister—it consists of a forbidden sign shaped like a shield that features a beast's open maw.
• Secret Wars (2015): Bar Sinister is a location on Battleworld that's naturally under the control of one Mister Sinister, a notorious Pungeon Master.
• Superman: Connor Kent burns a slash over the letter S scar on Superboy Prime's chest with heat vision. This marks Prime as a bastardized version of Superman's ideals and methods.

• The Weaver In Half Part: In the second chapter, Lurien muses that The King's newborn child is the start of a bend sinister line, a generational succession imbued with both great sin and great holiness.

Worm

• A Darker Path: Atropos carves one of these into Bastard Son's chest, explicitly because it was a symbol for a bastard son back in the day. For bonus points, she uses a bastard sword given to her by the son of a (metaphorical) bastard to do the deed.

• The Golden Woman: The film's alternate title, The Bar Sinister, refers to the fact that the protagonist, Annabel, is half-black. At the time, interracial marriages were forbidden, so she was born out of wedlock even if the movie doesn't outright state it.

• The Bar Sinister (Richard Haring Davis): The novel is about a dog called Kid who is the son of a thoroughbred bull-terrier and black-and-tan female of unknown pedigree. Dogs don't marry, so Kid's quote-unquote bastardry comes from the fact that he's not a pure-breed dog.
• The Bar Sinister (Sheila Simonson): The novel's title makes reference to Captain Richard Falk being the illegitimate son of the Duchess of Newsham and her extramarital lover. This is mitigated by the fact that the Duke of Newsham accepted him as a son and raised him for the first 12 years of his life.
• The Bar Sinister A Tale (Charles Allston Collins): It's a Spoiler Title about a young woman who seeks the truth of her mysterious origins and discovers she's illegitimate.
• Bend Sinister: The title is a clear reference to a Heraldry term once used as a sign of bastardry. According to Nabokov's commentary in the 1963 edition, it's less about that literal meaning and more about the fact that the In-Universe setting has taken a wrong turn; kinda like a A Sinister Clue. It can also be interpreted as referencing the dictatorial government's illegitimacy.
• Elsie and the Raymonds (Martha Finley): Captain Raymond uses the phrase "I am exceedingly ashamed of this bar sinister on the scutcheon of my country" to metaphorically refer to how he and his interlocutor think of old Mormon practices as a bastardization of their country's culture.
• Farseer (Robin Hobb): FitzChivalry is initially given the Farseer arms, of a buck's head, with a red diagonal line to mark his illegitimacy. It's suggested that, while he wouldn't be allowed to wear the royal arms without the line, all he'd have to do was ask and he'd be given his own arms with no such mark, and later this is given to him anyway.
• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (Robert A. Heinlein): The flag of the rebel Lunar colonists (most of whom are ex-cons or descendants of ex-cons, as Earth uses the Moon as a penal colony) proudly features a blood-red bar sinister.
• Prince Roger: When the titular character, a bastard son of the Empress of Earth, ends up stranded on a hostile planet and, for various reasons, finds himself raising a regiment of the local aliens (The Basik's Own), he includes a bar sinister in their colours. It doesn't apply to him personally, however. The Empire doesn't seem to have any rules regarding bastards and as such he is considered a legal heir to the throne (behind his older half-siblings) despite his parents not being married.
  You bastard.
  Literally. The Basik's Own carries the bar sinister proudly.
• The Rutshire Chronicles: Bar Sinister, a seedy pub, is Rustshire's most prominent den of sin and iniquity. Drugs and alcohol are sold, extramarital sex and plenty of cheating go on there.
• A Song of Ice and Fire
  • The noble-born use a typical pattern; acknowledged bastard sons use a coat of arms—their noble father's coat of arms with the colors reversed. The bend sinister is known but not always used, whereas the reversed color pattern is nearly always used. Another marker is used by acknowledged bastards of nobles, whether they possess arms or not—a special surname based on the region of birth. Northmen use "Snow", Riverlanders use "Rivers", Crownlanders use "Waters", etc. As many commoners have no surname at all, even this minor inheritance serves to put lords' bastard children slightly above the average peasant in terms of social standing.
  • Not all bastard children, even noble-born acknowledged bastard children, are armigerous: Jon Snow, for example, though he is a highborn, acknowledged illegitimate son of a lord, is only entitled to the black shield of the Night's Watch since he joined the Watch (and this applies to every member of the Watch, no matter what their status is). Had Jon used his family arms it would have had a white wolf, as the Stark arms are a grey wolf on a white field. This is why it's significant that his pet wolf Ghost is an albino, while his littermates had regular grey coats. Additionally, his sword Longclaw has a white wolf pommel; it originally had a bear (House Mormont's sigil), but Jeor had it changed so it would be a more appropriate gift to Jon.
  • There is no evidence of Ramsay Snow, bastard son of Roose Bolton, being armigerous before he was legitimized; Ramsey briefly used the Bolton arms before that and Roose took serious offense and told him not to. However, Walder Rivers, a highborn acknowledged Frey bastard son, has both the bend sinister and the reversed colors.
  • Daemon Blackfyre, founder of the Blackfyre dynasty of pretenders to the Iron Throne, is a bastard son of King Aegon IV and took a black three-headed dragon on red (the reversed Targaryen sigil, a red three-headed dragon on black) as his family's sigil.
  • A Dance with Dragons: Discussed by a pair of secondary characters. Penny asks her companion what it means that there's a thick band of clouds on the horizon. He answers her that it's a bar sinister in the sky, so a bastard is chasing them.
• Technic History: Flandry is the bastard of a nobleman. He makes reference to it in a punny way. He says, "You see, my father walked into this sinister bar...."

• Endeavour: The coat-of-arms Terence Black has been working with Adrian Weiss on features one of these; he's later revealed to be descended from the illegitimate son of the Blaise-Hamilton family's Victorian patriarch. This is shown in the episode "Nocturne".

• Crusader Kings: An icon of a shield with a bend sinister is used to represent bastards in the first game, but is replaced (probably for both accuracy and clarity) with a more obvious symbol in the sequel.

• Underdog: Dr. Simon Bar Sinister is the main antagonist. Besides being a highbrow reference to Simon bar Kokhba, the name could be translated as "Simon, the Bastard".

• One of the platforms at Euston Station, London, is decorated with the coat of arms of the Duke of Grafton, whose family seat is Euston Hall in Sussex and who holds the subsidiary title Earl of Euston (and the heir to the dukedom is usually called the Earl of Euston by courtesy). The land on which the station was built was historically owned by the Dukes of Grafton; indeed, the area later gained the name "Fitzrovia" (after the Duke's surname "Fitzroy"—that is, "son of the King") because it was largely owned by the Duke and his family. The Dukes of Grafton are descended from an illegitimate son of King Charles II, and the baton sinistre is seen as an important enough part of the Grafton coat of arms that when they painted an abstract pattern to represent the coat of arms, the baton was the "main feature". (The title still exists, by the by, and the family still uses the arms with the baton sinister.)
• Another family descended from one of Charles II's bastards that uses the baton sinister is the Dukes of St Alban's. Oddly, the Dukes of Richmond (and Lennox and Gordon), the third such surviving family, do not have this feature on their arms, which they do splash about a bit (they’re heavily involved with motor racing and with Rolls-Royce).