Also called: Meen · मीन · Matsya Chinha · Matsya Rekha · Matsya Yoga · Machli

Where on the hand: Classically at the terminus of the Life line over the Ketu/Moon area at the base of the palm; also on the wrist bracelets, on any of the mounts, and riding on the Fate or Life line.

What it looks like: Two curved lines running roughly parallel that cross and overlap at two points, enclosing between them a closed pointed oval — an eye- or leaf-shaped body, fatter in the middle, tapering to a point at each end. Beyond the crossing at one end the two lines continue past each other for 3–5 mm and splay apart into a shallow V — the tail. The opposite point of the oval is the mouth or head. To draw it: a lens/vesica shape made of two arcs meeting at two cusps, with both arcs running on past one cusp into a small forked tail. A 'large' fish spans perhaps a fingertip's width; genuine ones are small enough that daylight and a lens are recommended.

The most precisely described sign in the corpus and the one most often misidentified. It signifies wealth — especially unearned or ancestral — divine protection, long life, foreign travel and sea-voyage, religiosity, charity and comfort. The classical texts give a more restrained reading: a fish mark means the person will daily feed many people, an annadātā or feeder of multitudes; two fishes together are a mark of royalty. Serious practitioners note that many people with fish signs are not wealthy, and read it as marking merit, protection and 'sustained sufficiency' rather than guaranteed riches.

Western reading: Mrs. J. B. Dale's Indian Palmistry (1895), fig. 1, gives the fish as 'great success in the world, riches and many children.'

Read with care: A downward-facing fish is treated in some Hindi sources as a marker of Pitṛ Doṣa, with ancestral rites (śrāddha, tarpaṇa, Gaya piṇḍa-dāna) as the prescribed response. There is also a real dissenting minority position: the palmist Manish Paliwal treats fish signs as functionally identical to islands and therefore negative — a fish on the Saturn mount as loss of money, litigation and depression, with a strong Mars or sister line able to mitigate. Recorded here because a catalogue that suppressed it would be misleading. Citation precision: the annadātā reading is Bṛhat Saṃhitā 68.44 alone (not shared with the Garuḍa Purāṇa), and 68.44 requires TWO fish in the middle of the palm, not one fish anywhere. RECONCILED (this reference previously contradicted itself). The distinguishing test is the tail and the crossing: a MATSYA has a crossed tail formed by two lines crossing beyond the closed body; an ISLAND (द्वीप dvīpa) is a single line splitting and rejoining — a closed loop with no tail and no crossing. The description of the fish as 'a large island formed where the life line's branches curve back' was the error and has been withdrawn. Confusing the two is the commonest mistake in amateur reading.

great success in the world, riches and many childrenMrs. J. B. Dale, Indian Palmistry (1895), fig. 1

the person will daily feed many peopleGaruḍa Purāṇa / Bṛhat Saṃhitā