SANTA CRUZ >> If you’ve never seen it, you haven’t been paying attention.

It’s on Pacific Avenue, at the Boardwalk, at the Capitola Mall, on the UC Santa Cruz campus, in parks and at the beach. It’s lounging around living rooms and skulking around breakfast tables all around Santa Cruz County and, in fact, cities and towns around the world. If you have teens in the house, look in the laundry.

It’s a cartoonish drawing of a left hand, crudely dismembered at the wrist and incongruously colored an aggressive shade of electric blue. Its clawing fingers are pulled back to reveal its palm, on which — weirdly, hilariously — is a teeth-baring, tongue-waggling mouth screaming in rage.

It is the Screaming Blue Hand, and in the subculture of skateboards and in the wider world of counterculture commercial graphic art, it is one of the most popular images on the planet.

If you’ve never seen Screaming Blue Hand, you may be seeing a lot of it in August.

The Hand is pure Santa Cruz. It is the work of legendary Santa Cruz graphic artist Jim Phillips, and it has been managed, protected, licensed and distributed by the Santa Cruz-based skateboard company NHS. In 2015, NHS celebrated the logo’s 30th birthday with a traveling art show featuring prominent artists doing interpretations of the Hand. That art show eventually traveled to more than 25 cities across the globe and is now, a year later, finally coming home to Santa Cruz, where it will settle at the Museum of Art & History.

The show will include about 200 pieces of art, all riffing on the Hand, from ink on paper to beer can sculpture. The show puts the famous image in a wide variety of different contexts, changes it colors, its style, its personality, all to underscore what a durable and resonant image it’s been for three decades.

The show even features contributions from its creator, Jim Phillips, as well as his son, Jimbo Phillips, and even his 14-year-old grandson (and presumably one day the inheritor of the Phillips skateboard art empire), Colby Phillips.

In the garage of his spacious home in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Santa Cruz, Jim Phillips, 71, is surrounded by incarnations of the Screaming Hand, from pillows to beach towels to — what may be more valuable than all the rest of them to Phillips — one of Colby’s first renderings when the boy was about 4.

He joked that his grandson recently came home with a T-shirt that neatly illustrated the current state of his status as a pre-eminent skateboard artist. The T-shirt showed the Screaming Hand coming up from behind and consuming the “Red Dot” Santa Cruz Skateboards logo, also a Phillips creation that may even be more popular than the Hand.

“It’s amazing,” Phillips said of the Hand’s longevity and continuing popularity. “It’s just unheard of in this kind of commercial art. Usually, you do it and it’s done with. It’s over. People think, ‘Aw, we don’t want this old grandpa stuff.’ Well, here I am, an old grandpa. Thirty years later, and it’s more popular than ever.”

Bob Denike of NHS, which conceived of and managed the global art tour (along with artist Mark Widmann), likes to divide the history of skateboard art around the fulcrum of Jim Phillips.

“Jim’s a really humble guy,” said Denike, “but in terms of skateboard art, there are two eras: Before Jim Phillips and After Jim Phillips.”

Skateboard art is, of course, not merely for skateboards. Phillips’s art has launched a million T-shirts, caps, swim trunks, sneakers, you name it. NHS sells its own merchandise or licensed merchandise manufactured by other companies in 80 countries and the Red Dot and Screaming Hand lead the way in nearly every one of them.

The Hand dates to 1985, when Phillips was asked to conceive of a graphic for an NHS line of skateboard wheels. Phillips had always toyed around with the image of the hand, and he shows me a drawing he did in 1959, while still a student at Santa Cruz High School, of a hand coming out of the ocean, as if from a drowning person.

Scratching his head for an idea, Phillips began to sketch his own left hand right in front of him. Then, it hit him: “What if I put a mouth right in the middle of it?”

Phillips has created hundreds of images, most of which rise and fall without a trace. But this one endured, maybe because, as Phillips believes, it perfectly illustrates a kind of angst that many skateboarders feel in a dominant culture that still looks at them as nuisances or delinquents.

“It expresses the inexpressible,” he said.

Five years ago, Phillips was diagnosed with bone-marrow cancer. But he’s undergoing treatment, and today he’s grateful that he has lived to see his work balloon into a global phenomenon.

Measured strictly by the number of eyeballs that engage with a piece of art, Jim Phillips is likely the most successful visual artist to ever come out of Santa Cruz, a town chock full of artists.

“That’s a big part of why we wanted to do this,” said NHS’s Denike. “We wanted to honor Jim, who has been such a big part of this company and this industry.”

Not to mention the global image of the city of Santa Cruz.

When Denike travels to other parts of the world, he often finds fans of the Red Dot and the Screaming Hand who are surprised when he tells them he lives in Santa Cruz.

“They’ll say, ‘Wait, Santa Cruz is a town? I thought it was just a skateboard brand.’”

THE SCREAMING HAND

When: Opening Friday, Aug. 5, with an artist talk by Jim Phillips and Bob Denike 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. The exhibit runs through March 26, 2017.

Where: Museum of Art & History, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz

Tickets: Opening night reception free, part of First Friday Santa Cruz

Details: santacruzmah.org