Also called: Varāhamihira ch. 70 · the twenty-three queen-making marks

Where on the hand: The hands and the feet; some rules concern the palm's depth and the lines below the thumb-root.

What it looks like: Not a mark. A single verse enumerating twenty-three shapes, any of which in a woman's hand or foot is said to make her a queen.

This is the single densest classical enumeration of auspicious palm-marks in Sanskrit — a twenty-three-item canonical list. The same chapter adds rules on palm depth, on the lines below the thumb-root as indicators of children, and a short list of inauspicious animal shapes.

Read with care: The chapter's frame is that a woman's marks predict queenship through marriage, and its 'inauspicious animal shapes' clause predicts poverty and misery. Both are recorded here as classical tradition, not as guidance.

If the lines in the hands and feet be of the shape of a pitcher, a seat, a horse, an elephant, a chariot, the bilva tree, an eight-sided post, an arrow, a flower wreath, a pendant, a cāmara, an elephant driver's hook, a barley grain, a mountain, a flag-staff, an arch-way, a fish, a cross, a sacrificial altar, a fan, a conch-shell, an umbrella or a lotus flower — the woman will become a queen.Bṛhat Saṃhitā 70