Battenburg markings are a pattern of high-visibility markings used primarily on the sides of emergency service vehicles. The name comes from the similarity in appearance to the cross-section of a Battenberg cake.

Battenburg markings were originally developed in the mid-1990s in the UK by the Police Scientific Development Branch (PSDB) (now the Home Office Scientific Development Branch (HOSDB)) at the request of the national motorway policing sub-committee of the Association of Chief Police Officers. They were first developed for the United Kingdom police forces to use on traffic patrol cars, although other private organisations and civil emergency services have since started to use the pattern on their vehicles.

The brief was to create a livery for motorway and trunk road police vehicles which would maximise the visibility of the vehicles when stopped on scene, both in daylight, and under headlights from a minimum distance of 500 m, and which would distinctively mark it as a police car.

The key research objectives included:

Lace is an openwork fabric, patterned with open holes in the work, made by machine or by hand. The holes can be formed via removal of threads or cloth from a previously woven fabric, but more often open spaces are created as part of the lace fabric. Lace-making is an ancient craft. True lace was not made until the late 15th and early 16th centuries. A true lace is created when a thread is looped, twisted or braided to other threads independently from a backing fabric.

Originally linen, silk, gold, or silver threads were used. Now lace is often made with cotton thread, although linen and silk threads are still available. Manufactured lace may be made of synthetic fiber. A few modern artists make lace with a fine copper or silver wire instead of thread.

There are many types of lace, classified by how they are made. These include:

The word lace is from Middle English, from Old French las, noose, string, from Vulgar Latin *laceum, from Latin laqueus, noose; probably akin to lacere, to entice, ensnare.