Also called: loop · fingertip conch · shankh pattern

Where on the hand: On the pad of each fingertip; every fingertip carries either a shankh or a chakra, never both. Examination requires a magnifying glass.

What it looks like: The fingertip ridges enter from one side, curve round a core, and exit the SAME side — an open, comma- or shell-like curve with a single triradius. Drawn as a set of nested hairpin curves opening toward one edge of the fingertip.

This is a separate system from the palm-symbols and one of the most distinctively Indian pieces of the tradition: it reads dermatoglyphics, not lines. The reading is by COUNT of shankh across all ten fingers, not by which finger carries them. The tradition's memorable formula: ten shankh = the yogi; ten chakra = the king.

Read with care: The two fingertip-count systems contradict each other and must not be blended — one gives five loops as lucky, the other five as wealth and four as poverty. Separately: the modern table predicts depression at named ages. That is false, not merely traditional. Naming an age makes it worse, because it is specific enough to be waited for and to become self-fulfilling. Fingerprints are fixed before birth; nothing about them forecasts mental health. The competing table also rests on a rejected source (see Sources). RECONCILED. This reference contradicted itself on whether Indian palmistry reads skin ridges. It does: the shankh/chakra fingertip system is one of the most widespread pieces of Indian hand-lore and is explicitly dermatoglyphic. What CLASSICAL Sanskrit sāmudrika ignores is charma rekha. The flat statement that 'Indian palmistry does not use skin ridges at all' should be read as applying to the classical texts only.

राजा के समान जीवन — a life like a king'sHindi fingertip-mark sources, on ten chakras