The open-palm hamsa hand (🪬): a protective amulet older than Judaism and Islam, used today by both traditions under different names: the Hand of Miriam and the Hand of Fatima. Click any symbol to copy it instantly.
The hamsa (🪬, U+1FAAC) is a palm-shaped amulet believed to protect against the ‘evil eye.’ Hand-shaped protective symbols predate the Abrahamic religions: open-hand amulets appear in Mesopotamian religious imagery associated with the goddess Ishtar, and separate carved hand images turn up on Phoenician and Carthaginian stelae from North Africa. Today the same five-fingered shape is claimed by two different living traditions under two different names: in Jewish use it's the ‘Hand of Miriam,’ its five fingers sometimes linked to the five books of the Torah; in Islamic use it's the ‘Hand of Fatima,’ named for the Prophet Muhammad's daughter, with its fingers linked to the Five Pillars. A 2015 UCLA student survey on the symbol found that most Jewish and Muslim students it asked already knew the hamsa is shared across both faiths, a rare case of a religious-adjacent symbol used to mark common ground rather than a dividing line. It was added to Unicode in September 2021 (Unicode 14.0).
The Unicode hamsa emoji and the nazar amulet it's most often paired with in protective, cross-cultural use.
Other open-hand and eye characters commonly used alongside the hamsa in protective or spiritual contexts.
Other faith and spiritual symbols the hamsa is often searched and displayed alongside.
A Discord nickname stops at 32 characters, an Instagram bio at 150, a TikTok bio at 80, and X weights some characters as two. The UltraTextGen counter reads all of them at once, and counts a multi-codepoint Unicode emoji the way each platform actually bills it.
Open the character counter →The nazar amulet, the hamsa hand, and the eye and charm symbols that ward off bad luck.
Another symbol with a real, documented design history, reported without picking a side.
A shared ancient motif's own surprisingly recent path to becoming a single faith's symbol.
The ankh (☥).
The star and crescent (☪ ☪️).
Om, or Aum (ॐ, 🕉️).