The Reading Hand
Three Hands in Chiromancy
A horoscope cast on skin — the hand tied to the heavens.
- Work
- from an English chiromancy manual
- Maker
- Manuscript hand, unknown
- Date
- 1648
- Source
- Wellcome Collection, London (MS 8727)
Wellcome Collection. Public Domain / CC BY 4.0
Format
The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source plate — yours to print, study, and explore.
Size
$29.00
The story
Three hands set out together on a single leaf, each crowded with lines, mounts, and little symbols — planets seated at the base of each finger, the palm laid out like a chart of the heavens in miniature. The drawing belongs to an English practical manual of chiromancy dated 1648, the work of a careful anonymous hand. Its author tied the palm to astrology, giving each region its ruling planet, so that reading a hand became a kind of casting a horoscope on skin. We present it as a document of its century's thought — an elaborate, internally consistent system, offered here for the history it records and the strange beauty of its diagram, not for any claim it made.
See it on your wall
The plate, in your home
Three Hands in Chiromancy printed large and framed, hung in rooms like yours. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.
About this reproduction
- A faithful reproduction of a public-domain plate — from an English chiromancy manual (1648), held by Wellcome Collection, London (MS 8727). The work was published before 1931 and is centuries out of copyright.
- Printed to order on 200gsm EMA matte art paper; framed pieces sit behind acrylic, no mat.
- Color-managed to the source scan; we correct nothing and invent nothing.
- Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed pieces ship flat-packed).
- If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.
Why our plates cost more than a poster: we print from the highest-resolution scans available, at sizes where the engraving itself becomes visible — the emblem line, the letterpress bite, the registration of colour — on stock made to outlive its owner.
Attribution: Wellcome Collection. Public Domain / CC BY 4.0
