Palm reading lines: what every line on your hand means
Palm reading lines and their meaning, all on one annotated hand: heart, head, life and fate, then the minor lines. Tap a line to see how to read your own.
Heart line
Major line, one of the three principal lines
- Where it runs
- Across the top of the palm under the fingers, from the little-finger edge towards the index or middle finger.
- What palmistry reads it for
- Affection and how you show it. Cheiro wrote that it "relates purely to the affectionate disposition".
- Also called
- Love line, line of affections. Mrs. Dale's 1895 book calls it the line of Fortune or the Table line.
Palm reading lines are the creases on the inside of your hand, and palmistry gives each one a name and a subject. The heart line is read for affection, the head line for how you think, the life line for energy, and the fate line for work and direction. Four smaller lines come after those: sun, marriage, children and money. Some marks, like the M or a single crease across the palm, get readings of their own.
That's the tradition's map, and it's worth knowing as a map. The creases themselves are something plainer. Susan Blackmore, writing for BBC Science Focus, describes them as "palmar flexion creases" that "develop before birth" and let us make a fist "without excessive stretching". Nobody has shown that any line can predict an event, so everything below is what palmistry says, kept apart from what has been measured.
Palm lines meaning at a glance
If you searched for hand lines meaning or palmistry lines, this table is the short answer. There are eight names, in the order most charts give them, and each links to a page that goes much further than a table can.
| Line | Where it runs | What palmistry reads it for |
|---|---|---|
| Heart line | Across the top of the palm, under the fingers | Affection, and how you show it |
| Head line | Across the middle, level or sloping down | How you think and make decisions |
| Life line | In an arc round the base of the thumb | Energy and grounding. It doesn't measure lifespan |
| Fate line | Up the middle towards the middle finger | Work and direction. Many hands barely show one |
| Sun line | Up the palm towards the ring finger | Recognition, and what you are known for |
| Marriage lines | Short marks on the edge, under the little finger | Close bonds. The books disagree on what they count |
| Children lines | Fine upright marks near the marriage lines | The old books counted them. No hand can tell you this |
| Money line | Depends on the site: three different places | Income and luck with money, in modern pages only |
The four main lines on the palm
The heart line runs across the top of the palm, under the fingers. Cheiro, the palmist whose 1916 handbook we quote most here, wrote that it "relates purely to the affectionate disposition". His main reading rested on where the line begins: he named five starting points, and modern pages mostly forget them.
Below it, the head line crosses the middle of the palm. Cheiro called it "the most important sign that can be found in the hand" and compared it to a compass needle. Palmistry reads a style of thinking from it, level and practical or sloping and imaginative. A long line doesn't mean a clever person. Nothing on a palm measures that.
The life line arcs round the base of the thumb, and it does not measure lifespan. Cheiro did claim it could "foretell the length of life from natural causes", which made it the one claim in palmistry that researchers could test. Three studies did. One reported a link with age at death, and two found none. Modern readers treat the line as a sign of energy and grounding instead.
The fate line climbs the middle of the palm towards the middle finger, and it's the one most likely to be missing. People search for it because they can't find theirs. Cheiro's own answer: "There are some who appear to have no Fate." That's an ordinary hand.
The minor lines, more briefly
These are finer, and plenty of hands show few of them. The sun line, also the line of Apollo, climbs towards the ring finger and is read for recognition. The marriage lines are short marks on the edge of the hand under the little finger, and the old books can't agree on what they count. The children lines are finer still. Old books told readers to count them, but they disagree even about where to look, and no line can tell you about a family. The money line is a modern name with no fixed address: different sites give it to different lines.
Major and minor is more than a palmist's ranking. Liu and Zhang, who work on identifying people from their palms, write that "there are three principal lines in a palm which are most notable and vary little over time", and that wrinkles are "much thinner than principal lines and much more irregular". So the heart, head and life lines are physically a different class of mark from a tiny tick under your little finger. How much meaning either can carry is another question.
Marks, which aren't lines at all
Five searches that bring people here are about a shape or a spot. Each has its own page, because the evidence behind each one is so different.
The viral one. We looked for a real count of how rare it is, and nobody seems to have made one.
Heart and head as one line. Often normal, about 1 person in 30, and it has real medical literature.
An X between heart and head, with a test for near misses.
Your hand won't match the picture
Every chart, including ours, draws a tidy hand. Real ones aren't. Here's what to do with the five things people notice first.
I'm missing a line.
Fate, sun, money and children lines are absent from plenty of hands. If you seem to have no heart or head line, look for one long crease right across the palm: the two have merged. MedlinePlus puts a single palmar crease at about 1 in 30 people and calls it "often normal".
Mine is doubled.
Fine second lines often run beside a main one. Cheiro called them sister lines and said they "increase or double the power" of the line. That's his reading, with no count behind it. To a biologist it's one more fold.
It breaks halfway.
Skin folds have gaps. Cheiro thought a gap mattered less "if one line ends above the other". Nobody has tested that, and no gap is a date on a calendar.
It's too faint to tell.
Try a lamp from one side, which throws a shadow into the crease. If it still doesn't show, count it as absent, as the old books did. Cheiro read a barely visible fate line as "a general disbelief in the idea of Fate", which is at least a good joke.
My two hands differ.
Most people's do in the details. Among 832 students in Ethiopia, 93.1% had the same crease pattern on both palms, which leaves plenty of room for different lengths and branches. Markun noted in 1927 that the life line "is seldom of equal length in both hands".
How many lines should a palm have?
It depends entirely on who is counting, and the three counts below were all made in good faith.
Two
"Most people have two main lines across the palm."
Three
"Three principal lines." Biometrics stops here.
Fifteen
Cheiro's contents page, from the Line of Head to the Ring of Solomon.
If your palm shows the first three and little else, nothing is missing. Wikipedia's entry on palmistry lists seven in one caption, for what it's worth, and no authority sets the number.
The names aren't stable
Search two pages and you may find the same line under different names, or the same name on different lines. That has always been so. Here's what four books we read in full call each line, from Project Gutenberg's plain texts.
- Heart
- Cheiro, 1916Line of Heart
- Dale, 1895Line of Fortune, or the Table line
- Williams, 1902Social or heart line
- Markun, 1927Heart Line, Line of Affections
- Head
- Cheiro, 1916Line of Head, Line of Mentality
- Dale, 1895Liver line
- Williams, 1902Line of thought
- Markun, 1927Head Line
- Life
- Cheiro, 1916Line of Life, "The Vital" among the ancients
- Dale, 1895Line of Life
- Williams, 1902Life line of action
- Markun, 1927Line of Life
- Fate
- Cheiro, 1916Line of Destiny or Fate
- Dale, 1895Line of Saturn
- Williams, 1902Not among his main lines
- Markun, 1927Fate Line, Line of Fortune
- Sun
- Cheiro, 1916Line of the Sun, of Success, of Brilliancy
- Dale, 1895Via Solis
- Williams, 1902Not among his main lines
- Markun, 1927Line of Apollo, Line of Brilliancy
Look at "Line of Fortune": in Dale it's the heart line, and in Markun it's the fate line. Dale also uses "Line of the Head and Brain", but for a different line, one running from the wrist up to the little finger's mount, while her head line is the Liver line. Williams complained in 1902 that "the ancient palmisters, as well as some of the modern school, confounded this line with the thought line", meaning the heart line, and he set the heart line in "the central position in the palm".
So if two pages disagree, neither has to be misreading a source. There was no single source. Markun, a skeptic who read the books of his day, says the modern arrangement "originated with two men, Hartlieb in the fifteenth century and d'Arpentigny in the middle of the nineteenth".
Do lines mean the same in every tradition?
No, and the first disagreement is which hand to read. Dale reports "the general rule in the East" as the right palm for men and the left for women. A travel site's guide to Chinese palmistry gives the opposite, left for men and right for women, and cites nothing. Cheiro ignores gender and says "both the hands should be examined together", with the left showing "natural tendencies" and the right "the developed or active brain". Williams has the left as "the hand of nature" and the right as the hand "of our desires". Our page on which hand to read sets those side by side.
Meanings vary just as much in the details, which is why this page gives each line a subject and leaves the fine readings to the line's own page, with a name and date on each claim. The wider practice has its own guide.
How to read the lines on your own hand
- Open the hand you write with, relaxed, the fingers a little apart. Turn it towards a window or a lamp at one side. Flat overhead light hides shallow creases.
- Find the arc round your thumb first, since almost nobody misses it. That's the life line. The line just above it, leaving the same edge of the palm, is the head line. The next one up, under your fingers, is the heart line.
- Look up the middle of the palm for a line climbing to your middle finger. If you can't find one, that's an answer too.
- Look under your ring finger for a short upright mark. Then curl your little finger slightly and look at the side of the hand below it, where the short edge lines show.
- Do the same on your other hand, and note what differs.
The printable chart puts all of this on one sheet. To work on a picture of your own hand, the line tracer lets you place a line yourself and snaps it to the crease, and the palm reading scanner looks for the main three by itself. We should be plain about its limits: in our tests it usually finds heart, head and life on a clear photo of an open hand, and it can't reliably find the fate line or the minor lines, so it doesn't pretend to. The free reading starts from what it does find.
Sources
- Cheiro, Palmistry for All
- Mrs. J. B. Dale, Indian Palmistry
- Louis Williams, Key to Palmistry
- Leo Markun, What You Should Know About Palmistry
- Susan Blackmore, Why do we have lines on the palms of our hands?
- Liu L, Zhang D. Palm-Line Detection
- Lucas T, Dhugga A, Henneberg M. Predicting longevity from the line of life: is it accurate?
- Single palmar crease
- Belay DG et al. Prevalence of palmar crease patterns among students at University of Gondar, Ethiopia
- Palmistry
- Palmistry: An Essential Guide
See your own lines traced
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Questions people ask
- What do the lines on your hand mean?
- Biologically they are flexion creases: folds that form before birth and let the hand close. In palmistry each has a subject. The heart line is read for affection, the head line for how you think, the life line for energy and the fate line for work and direction. Those subjects are a tradition. No good evidence shows a line predicts anything.
- Which line is the love line?
- Usually the heart line, the top line across the palm. Some pages also mean the short marriage lines on the edge of the hand. Markun's 1927 survey calls the heart line the Line of Affections, so the idea is old.
- Which line is the money line?
- There isn't one agreed line. The older books we checked have nothing by that name. Modern sites use it for lines under the little finger, the sun line towards the ring finger, or the fate line.
- How many lines should a palm have?
- There is no should. Most people have two main lines across the palm plus the arc round the thumb. Biometrics research counts three principal lines. The contents page of Cheiro's book names fifteen lines and rings. Plenty of hands show only the first three, and that is a normal hand.
- What is the difference between major and minor lines?
- Major lines are the deep, long creases: heart, head and life, often with fate added. Minor lines are shorter and fainter, and many hands lack some of them. Biometrics draws a similar distinction between principal lines, which vary little over time, and wrinkles, which are thinner and more irregular.
- Do palm lines change over time?
- The deep ones change very little. Liu and Zhang, writing on palm-line detection, describe the three principal lines as varying little over time, which is why they can identify a person. We found no long-term study of the fine marks, so we can't tell you how much those shift.
- Do the lines on both hands match?
- Often in overall pattern, rarely in every detail. In one study of 832 students, 93.1% had the same crease pattern on both palms. Markun noted in 1927 that the life line is seldom of equal length in both hands.
No chart draws your hand. A scan of it can.
See your own lines traced on your own photo, then read one of them in full.