Also called: Palmar dermatoglyphics · Loops of the palm · Skin ridge patterns · Palmar loops and whorls · Mount patterns

Where on the hand: Not on the fingertips but on the palm itself — in the four spaces below the finger bases, on the mounts of Venus, Luna and Lower Mars, in the plain of the palm and near the rascettes.

What it looks like: The fine parallel skin ridges that cover the whole palm occasionally swing out of their normal course and turn back on themselves, making a hairpin loop; less often they close into a whorl or flatten into an arch. They are ridge patterns, not creases, so they are pale, shallow and easiest to see in a rolled ink print or under a raking light and a lens.

Modern Western hand analysis treats these palmar patterns as fixed at birth and unchangeable, unlike the lines — so each one is read as an inborn, lifelong aptitude rather than a passing condition. A loop marks a channel of natural talent flowing between the two mounts or fingers it sits between; a whorl marks a self-contained, highly individual faculty; an arch marks a practical, earthbound version of the same. Most hands carry one or two; a hand with five or six named loops is unusual.

Read with care: Palmar dermatoglyphics are also a genuine field of medical and forensic research (the atd angle, ridge counts), where they are studied statistically and never used to predict character. The named 'loops' below belong to twentieth-century Western hand analysis, not to medical science, and not to classical Indian or Chinese palmistry, which do not use them at all. On how creases form: palmar creases are laid down between about week 7 (digital) and week 12 (palmar transverse), which the sources state correctly — but the common gloss that they are 'determined by fetal hand flexion' inverts the causality. Kimura & Kitagawa showed digital creases appear at 7–9 weeks while spontaneous digit flexion does not begin until about week 11.5. The flexion hypothesis was refuted on timing; creases form under genetic control. 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.