Thread:Epic gammer/@comment-104549-20170915234951/@comment-104549-20171129040716

Assuming we're talking about this image, I'm not sure I concur with your analysis that they were "all open to the public" if you meant by that that anyone could use the images freely (essentially making them either Creative Commons or Public Domain). I followed the sourcing to this site, and from there to this Reddit thread, where I found Reddit user akh, who is apparently the original artist. Nothing on any of those sites suggests any licensing other than standard copyright; can you give me a link that says otherwise?

I presume akh made the flag in Paint or something more complex like PhotoShop. Obviously he used the, but you don't have to separately cite that; it's a larger part of the whole work, so you can just source and license the flag itself without worrying about the component pieces.