The caveats

• **1. The classical corpus is much narrower than the modern lists.** Bṛhat Saṃhitā and the Garuḍa Purāṇa together yield roughly 30–35 distinct marks; the modern Hindi lists add trishul, damaru, shivling, om, tilak, temple, mirror, plank, tomb, begging bowl and more with no classical warrant. Both are legitimate as tradition; they are not the same tradition.
• **2. Location assignments are unstable.** Nikhil Astro World restricts the lotus to Jupiter, the temple to the Moon, the fish to Ketu, the conch to Inner Mars, the flag to the Sun; Nitin Kumar restricts the fish to the Ketu/Moon terminus of the Life line and *denies* that fish exist on Jupiter, Saturn, Sun or the Fate line at all; the Hindi press-astrology corpus places the fish on all nine mounts. There is no reconciled canon.
• **3. The fish/island confusion is systemic.** Most published 'fish sign' photographs are islands. Any serious use of this material has to enforce the tail-and-crossing test.
• **4. A real minority tradition reads the fish as negative** (Manish Paliwal) — recorded because a catalogue that suppressed it would be misleading.
• **5. The two fingertip-count systems contradict each other** and must not be blended.
• **6. Nothing in this catalogue is empirically validated.** The Hindi outlets themselves append disclaimers; the Buddhist sources note that the Buddha reportedly looked ordinary and rejected the idea that greatness derives from physical marks; and Dhamma Wiki reads the 32 marks as 'the ancient Indian concept of idealized physical beauty' rather than as diagnostics.