Elias ran to the tarmac. He didn't look at the wounded men being pulled from the waist-gunner windows. He looked at the nose. The shell had punched a hole right through the center of the painting. The bomb she sat on was gone. Her legs were gone.

She was "Lady Luck," but not the kind you’d find in a storybook. Elias had painted her in a 4:3 frame—a tight, 1920x1440 composition of defiant hope. She sat perched atop a massive, stylized aerial bomb as if it were a velvet lounge chair. Her hair was a halo of victory rolls, blonde as a harvest moon, and she held a pair of dice mid-toss. One die showed a six; the other was still tumbling, forever suspended in a blur of white lead paint.

The paint was still tacky when Elias brushed the final highlight onto the aluminum skin of The Gambler’s Grin , a B-17 Flying Fortress shivering on a rain-slicked runway in East Anglia, 1944.

When they limped back to base, the ground crew fell silent. The nose of the plane was a jagged ruin of twisted metal.

On the thirteenth mission, the sky turned a bruised purple. The engines screamed under the strain of a heavy payload, and the German interceptors came out of the sun like hornets. A 20mm shell tore through the nose, missing the navigator by inches but shredding the fuselage.

To the crew, she wasn’t just nose art. She was a contract.