The fifth sign is the one that says good

Five hands, drawn as plain line diagrams, run in a row across the chest. A flat palm held level. A palm angled down. A closed fist. Two fingers raised. A fist with the thumb held out. Under each, one word: SIT, DOWN, WAIT, HERE, GOOD.

Nobody taught this exact set anywhere. It was assembled, sign by sign, in one house.

Is there a standard set of hand signals for a deaf dog?

No. There is no single official system, and that turns out to be the interesting part.

Households with a deaf dog draw from whatever is already lying around: a few shapes lifted from American Sign Language, a few borrowed from ordinary obedience hand cues, and a few made up on the spot because nothing existing fit. The dog doesn't care where a sign came from. It learns whatever gets repeated consistently, which means the resulting vocabulary is closer to a household dialect than a taught curriculum — the same way a household ends up with its own word for a sound the dog makes rather than borrowing one that already exists.

Why only five signs?

Because five is roughly what a working vocabulary needs before it starts costing more effort than it earns.

Most sets settle around the same short list: stop what you're doing, get down, hold still, come here, and something that means you got it right. Add more and the shapes start to blur into each other from ten feet away, which defeats the point of a visual cue. Five distinct hand shapes are about as many as most people and most dogs keep sharp without thinking.

Why does GOOD have to be one of the five?

Because a deaf dog can't hear the tone of voice that normally does that job.

A hearing dog picks up praise from pitch and rhythm long before it learns the word. Take hearing out of the loop and that channel is just gone — the only way to close a command is a sign the dog can see. GOOD isn't a bonus sixth item tacked onto four working commands. It's load-bearing: without it, every other sign is an instruction with no way to confirm it landed.

Who is this vocabulary actually for?

The dog, mostly — but also whoever else ends up holding the lead.

A dog-sitter, a partner, a visiting relative walking the dog for a weekend: none of them can lean on tone of voice either, and a private system nobody outside the house has seen is no use to them. Deafness also arrives late in a lot of dogs, so the same household that's already adjusting to a slower, older animal is often the one building this vocabulary from scratch. Printing the five signs turns a set that lives in one person's hands into something a second person can actually read and use on the first try.

Does inventing signs instead of using ASL cut corners?

No — most working sets are a mix, and the mix is the normal version, not a shortcut off a proper one.

There's no requirement to run a full sign-language curriculum past a dog that will only ever use five to eight of its signs. Borrowing a recognisable ASL shape for one command and inventing another from scratch in the same set is how the households who already do this actually operate, the same instinct behind any working dog's job showing up as a specific gesture rather than a formal manual.

Does anyone own the shapes on this shirt?

Not in a way that stops you printing your own five.

A hand shape borrowed from ASL is drawn from a language, not a trademark, and a shape somebody invented at home belongs to that household the way any private habit does — nobody licenses "two fingers raised means come here." The one place this gets close to a real claim is a formal assistance-dog identifier: a patch or badge asserting a dog is certified, trained and registered by a specific organisation. That's a credential, not a decoration, and printing one without the standing to back it makes a claim rather than a picture. Five signs your own dog answers to don't make that claim. They just record what already works.

Does this print well on a shirt?

Yes — five clean line diagrams in one ink are close to the easiest thing on this site to reproduce.

Uniform-weight outlines with no shading and no fine crosshatching survive washing at almost any size, and keeping every hand the same line weight means none of the five reads as more important than another, which matters when the whole point is that they're read as a set. One blue ink on bone or a pale grey keeps the hands legible from across a room — which, for a design meant to be read at a glance by whoever's holding the lead that day, is the actual requirement.

How do I get one made?

Describe the signs at JustOG — how many, which words, and any particular hand shape your dog already knows. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Somewhere in the house, a flat palm held level means exactly one thing.