A solution with gear wheels you can find at HowTo: Working with contextual links to the panel.
The hardcopies at the beginning are from a very old Kirby 2 version, but you see “the four gear wheels in purple” in the first hardcopy, which are the “edit buttons” on the front end for a logged in user.
The new code runs on Kirby 3.
[Added:]
I updated the code in my linked solution.
And you should change the colour of the gear wheels…