Reading the hand

Palm lines meaning: a plain map of every line on your hand

Four major lines, a handful of minor ones, and one rule that matters more than any of them: read what is actually there, and say when the photograph cannot tell you.

Start with the right hand

Before any line, the hand. The tradition reads the dominant hand for where you are now and the other for what you started with, and a full reading compares the two. If you are not sure which to photograph, which hand gets read settles it in two minutes.

The four major lines

• The heart line runs across the top of the palm, under the fingers. It is read for how you attach to people: its curve, its length and especially where it ends. The heart line, read properly.
• The head line starts between thumb and forefinger and runs across the middle. It carries the most weight in a serious reading, for how you think: length, slope and where it starts. The head line.
• The life line curves around the base of the thumb. It is read for energy and how you meet change, never for how long you will live. The life line does not measure your life.
• The fate line runs up the middle of the palm towards the middle finger. A third of hands have no clear one, and that is ordinary. The fate line.

On some hands the heart and head lines are one crease straight across the palm. That is the simian line, uncommon and much mythologised.

The minor lines

• The sun line, or line of Apollo, runs up towards the ring finger. Read for recognition and creative satisfaction, and absent on many hands. The sun line.
• The marriage lines are short horizontal lines on the edge of the palm under the little finger. Read for the attachments that left a mark; they cannot count marriages. The marriage line.
• The girdle of Venus is a faint arc above the heart line, under the middle and ring fingers. Traditionally read as sensitivity. Most hands show part of it or none.
• The mystic cross is a small X between the heart and head lines, in the middle of the palm. The tradition reads it as an interest in the intuitive or the unexplained. It is easy to imagine in a photograph, so a careful reading only names it when the cross is clearly formed.

Lines are only half of it

The pads under each finger and at the base of the thumb are the mounts, and the tradition reads the lines against them. A head line sloping towards a full Mount of Luna reads differently from the same line on a flat palm. The seven mounts and the Mount of Venus cover that side.

What a photograph can and cannot show

The major creases photograph well. The minor lines, the girdle of Venus and the mystic cross are shallow, and flat front lighting erases them, so a missing minor line in a photo is often a lighting result and not a feature of the hand. Light from the side fixes most of it: how to photograph your palm.

None of these lines predicts anything. What the tradition offers is a structured way to talk about a person, and our readings label every claim with the feature it came from, so you can see the working.