Fate line: what it means, and what it means if you have none
The fate line runs up the middle of the palm, and many hands barely show one. See where to look, what palmistry reads in it and what having none means.
Cheiro: straight up from the wrist, with a sun line beside it, he calls "extreme good fortune". Markun's sources say "early responsibility": the subject "started to sell papers when he was five, perhaps".
Cheiro, 1916, and Markun, 1927
We don't try to tell you whether you have this line from a photo. In our tests the scan couldn't find it reliably, so this is one for your own eyes.
The scan traces the lines it can find with confidence, and lets you place the fate line by hand.
If you have no fate line, nothing is wrong with your hand. The fate line is a fine crease climbing the middle of the palm towards the middle finger, and many palms barely show one. Palmistry's own books knew this: "There are some who appear to have no Fate," wrote Cheiro, whose books many later writers built on. It isn't a verdict on your life, and it says nothing about what you'll do with it.
We're also not going to give you a figure for how many people lack one. Percentages circulate on palmistry sites, and when we searched for where they came from we found no source, no study and no count. So below you get what's known: where to look, how the old books read each start, and why a line called fate gets to decide nothing.
Where to look
Open your hand under a lamp held to one side, and follow the middle of your palm from the wrist up to the base of your middle finger. Dale's 1895 book calls this the "Line of Saturn", "extending from the wrist lines up to middle finger", since palmists give that finger to Saturn. Markun's description is the plainest: it "runs between the middle finger and the wrist".
Biometrics doesn't count it
When researchers built systems to identify people from their palms, they had no use for this line. Liu and Zhang: "Usually, there are three principal lines in a palm which are most notable and vary little over time." Those three are the heart, head and life lines. The fate line sits in the second class of marks, "much thinner than principal lines and much more irregular".
That matters for two reasons. It's one more sign that its absence is nothing unusual, and it's why our own scan struggles with it: lengthwise creases are faint, and many hands have several. The line tracer lets you place it yourself.
Having none is ordinary
The old books handled missing lines with a mix of shrug and snobbery. Cheiro's line, "some who appear to have no Fate", sits next to "others who seem to carve their Destiny from day to day", which is about as generous as a fatalist can get. He could be sniffy too: for a hand with no line and a very ordinary head line, he says such people "lead very colourless lives". That's a professional reader's opinion of some clients, with nothing counted.
His reading of a faint line is the one to keep. He says it's found on people "who rebel against the idea that they are governed in any way by Fate or by any power save themselves". So the one person who'd be unbothered by this page is exactly who he predicts would have a faint line. Then there's Markun in 1927, reporting that someone without the line "is the creature of circumstance" who may become "a vagrant, a speculator, a dealer in old clothes", and adding that it's "also possible that he should become a valet, a steel magnate, an oil king". His list goes on until it has covered everybody, and that's the point.
Four places it can start
"It may rise from and out of the Line of Life, straight up from the wrist, from the Mount of the Moon, or from the middle of the palm." That's Cheiro's complete list, and each one gets its own reading. Charts usually draw one straight line from the wrist, as if that were the only kind. Here are all four.
The wrist
"Luck, brilliance, and success", he says, with a sun line beside it. Markun: "early responsibility".
The life line
Success "by personal effort and merit". Markun's books: family influence.
The Mount of the Moon
"More eventful, changeable", depending on other people.
Mid-palm
A hard early start, then "the architect of his own fortunes".
No line
A normal hand. See the answer at the top of this page.
Check any two of those against each other and you see how loose the system is. Off the life line, Cheiro sees someone who wins "by personal effort and merit", and Markun's books see someone for whom "the family influence is important". From the wrist, Cheiro sees "extreme good fortune", and Markun's books have the subject who "started to sell papers when he was five, perhaps". If you recognize yourself in one, that says something about how you see your own story. It may be the most useful thing this line can do.
Cheiro wasn't even keen on a strong line. A heavy single line with no branches, the one most pages would congratulate you for, he compares to "a child of Fate chained to an iron road of circumstances", and adds that it "must never be considered as a good line of Destiny". What he wanted was a line "not too heavily marked, but just clear and distinct", and with a sun line beside it. So a deep line doesn't mean a strong career, and the man most often quoted on it didn't think so either. Neither view has any evidence behind it.
A break or a shift
Most people who find a fate line find a broken one. The tradition reads a break as a change of direction: Markun's sources call it "a period of worry, or else a change of occupation". Cheiro's version has more structure. A break is "not always a bad sign", he says, "provided that one side begins before the other ends", in which case it means "a complete change in surroundings and position".
Plenty of pages will now tell you the year it happens. Cheiro himself cut the line into periods of seven years. Don't let anyone put a date on yours: nothing about a skin fold is a calendar, and nobody has tested such a thing. If you're going through a change right now and you found a gap in your line, you've found a gap in your line.
Fate isn't fixed, whatever the line is called
Cheiro's chapter is frankly fatalist. "Nothing from the smallest to the greatest is left to blind chance," he writes, and advises us to "accept whatever the task should prove". He's worth reading as a piece of history, and you needn't agree with a word of it.
Modern palm readers have moved the other way, describing the line as a record of how you approach work, and often adding that you can change it. That has no evidence behind it either. It's just a kinder story, and you get to pick your stories.
Prompts for a career decision
You can use the idea without believing in it. Next time you're weighing a job or a change of direction, try these.
- Which of the four starts sounds most like how you got here: your own push, your family's, chance and other people, or a late start in the middle?
- If there were a break in your line at this point, would you want it to be a gap, or an overlap, with the new thing begun before the old one ends?
- Markun's side lines stand for "hobbies, avocations, and subsidiary interests". Which of yours deserves to be the main line?
Some sites also call this the money line, which is a different page's argument. The overview of palm lines shows how it relates to the rest, and the life line page covers the one line people have really studied. For your own hand, the scanner traces what it can see with confidence, and the free reading starts from there.
Sources
Place your fate line, and it gets read with the rest
The scan is unreliable on this line, so if you can see yours, you place it by hand. The work and choices chapters of the Complete Palm Reading read it from there.
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Questions people ask
- What does it mean if I have no fate line?
- Nothing bad. In palmistry's own books some hands simply lack it: Cheiro wrote that there are some who appear to have no Fate. Biometrics doesn't even count it among the three principal lines of the palm. It's a fine crease that many hands barely show.
- Is it rare not to have a fate line?
- We don't know, and neither does anyone else as far as we can find. Percentages circulate online with no source, so we won't repeat them. It's common enough that the old books had a stock response to it.
- Is the fate line about career?
- That's the modern reading. The old books read it as the main events of a career and a person's destiny more widely. Lines running beside it, Markun reports, were read as hobbies and side interests. None of this has been tested.
- What does a broken fate line mean?
- Palmistry reads it as a change of direction. The old books liked a break where one part starts before the other ends, and called it a complete change in surroundings and position. It isn't a dated forecast. Nothing on a hand gives a date.
- Where does the fate line start?
- The old books name four places: the life line, the wrist, the mount of the Moon on the far side of the palm, and the middle of the palm. All of them end in the same place, climbing to the base of the middle finger.
- Can a fate line appear later in life?
- Palmists say so, and we found no study following one hand's minor creases over the years to check. What researchers do say is that wrinkles are thinner and more irregular than the principal lines, so fine marks are the likeliest to come and go.
- Does a fate line mean my future is fixed?
- No. The Victorian palmists wrote as if it did, and that's history. Nobody has shown any palm line predicts an event, and a crease in your skin doesn't limit what you do next.
Faint, broken, missing: all ordinary. See what yours does.
Scan your hand and look at your own lines, on your own photo.