Unalome
The unalome (Thai อุณาโลม, unalom) is a Thai sacred sign: a line that curls into a spiral and then runs straight up. It is the ūrṇā, the curl of white hair between the Buddha’s eyebrows, and in Thai yantra it is the sign of the enlightenment of an arahant.
Meaning
Unalome is the usual English spelling of the Thai word อุณาโลม, unalom. The word is built on the Sanskrit ūrṇā and the Pali uṇṇā, words for wool that also name the mark on the Buddha’s forehead, as James Clark set out when he proposed adding the sign to Unicode in 2014. In the Pali canon’s Lakkhaṇa Sutta that mark is the thirty-first of the thirty-two marks of a great man: “between the eyebrows a hairy mole, white and like soft cotton-down”, in the Rhys Davids translation of 1921. Thai art draws it as a spiral. The Thailand Foundation describes the ūrṇā on Buddha images as “a spiral resembling a conch shell”, and in a yantra, the sacred diagrams of Thai Buddhist practice, it stands for the enlightenment of an arahant, one who has attained nirvana. The unalome belongs to Thai Buddhism today, drawn on yantra cloths and tattooed as sak yant, and Clark notes the same form in Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia.
Origin and history
The Lakkhaṇa Sutta explains how the mark is earned. The sutta lists the thirty-two marks of the “Superman” (the Rhys Davids’ word for the great man, who has two careers open to him, “that of the Lord of the Wheel and that of Buddha Supreme”), and says that the tuft between the eyebrows, with the down growing in separate hairs over his body, comes to one who in former lives was a truth-speaker, “bound to truth, trustworthy, consistent, breaking his word to no one”.
In Siam it became a royal mark. Rama I, founder of the present Thai royal dynasty, used the unalom as his mark on the pod duang, the bullet coins of Siam, according to a 2010 study of the royal marks on the coins by Manit Labilla at Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University, based on the royal chronicles, the Law of the Three Seals and royal acts. Clark adds that it is the main part of Rama I’s seal and part of the emblem of the Royal Thai Army; Manit’s study gives it as the army’s cap badge.
The Brahman priests of the Siamese court drew it on the body. H. G. Quaritch Wales describes in Siamese State Ceremonies (1931) how, at a prince’s tonsure, the head priest anointed the boy’s left palm “in the form of a unalom scroll (sign of Siva)”, because a prince’s forehead was too sacred to touch; the prince then passed his finger across his palm and drew the unction between his own eyebrows. At the Swinging Festival the head priest marked his forehead with sandalwood paste and made unalom signs on his body.
The Thai Red Cross began under the sign. King Chulalongkorn approved the “Red Unalom Society of Siam” on 26 April 1893, during the conflict between Siam and France, to send medicine, food and clothes to the wounded. Clark writes that its first emblem was a red unalom combined with a cross; the society is now the Thai Red Cross Society.
The Buddha’s mark or the sign of Shiva?
Thai sources give the sign both readings. The Thailand Foundation and Clark read it as the Buddha’s ūrṇā. Quaritch Wales, describing the Brahman rites of the Siamese court in 1931, called the unalom scroll the “sign of Siva”, and Manit Labilla’s study of Rama I’s coins finds both in it: the third eye of Shiva from Hinduism, and the Lotus and conch from Buddhist belief, which in the study stand for the prosperity of the nation. Clark, citing Carol Stratton’s Buddhist Sculpture of Northern Thailand, adds that the unalom or ūrṇā has also been read as a picture of the sound om.
In yantra and sak yant
A yantra (Thai yan) is a diagram of circles, triangles and other shapes that came from Brahmanical Hinduism. In Thailand, the Thailand Foundation writes, its shapes “were complemented with, if not totally replaced by, Buddhist mantras, spells, and symbols”, mostly written in the Khom script, a form of the old Khmer script that Thais still regard as sacred. The ūrṇā is one of those symbols. Yantras are drawn on cloth, rings, doors and cars, and on the shirts of soldiers going to war; tattooed into the skin they are sak yant.
To wear a yantra, in the foundation’s words, “is to invite the sacredness of the Triple Gems (the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha) into one’s body”, and the wearer must behave worthy of it. Tattoo masters set rules for the people they tattoo, against adultery or mistreating their parents, for example, and a wearer who breaks them is held to lose the yantra’s power, leaving “nothing more than an ink mark on the body”. Wearers attend a Wai Khru ceremony to honour their master before and after the tattoo. The best known is held every year by the disciples of the monk Luang Phor Pern at Wat Bang Phra, who vow there to keep the five Buddhist precepts.
Worn today
Writing in Tricycle in 2016, Mark Hay noted rising concern about Western misuse of Asian Buddhist symbols in tattoos. He recorded that Thailand’s Culture Ministry proposed a ban on tourists getting religious tattoos in 2011, and that a billboard by an international airport in Thailand later told foreigners it was inappropriate to get tattoos of the Buddha. For those with tattooing traditions such as sak yant, Hay wrote, the hurt is “seeing someone subvert your culture in flippantly disrespectful ways, like getting a tattoo on an ‘unclean’ body part”. In the tradition itself, the Thailand Foundation says, a sak yant is a commitment: its wearer “must conduct themselves appropriately and worthy of that holiness”.
Read next
- Next in Buddhist symbolsMandalaA mandala is a sacred diagram of the universe in Hindu and Buddhist tantra, usually a circle enclosing a square palace with a gate in each side and a deity at its centre. Tibetan Buddhists paint it, build it in metal and lay it out in coloured sand for initiation and meditation.
- Siamese court Brahmans called the unalom scroll the sign of Shiva, and read it as his third eyeShivaShiva is the Supreme Being of Saivism, the Hindu tradition devoted to him. He is known by his trident with a small drum tied to it, the crescent moon at his brow, the snakes in his matted hair, and Nandi, the white bull he rides.
See also
Dharmachakra, Ensō, Bodhi leaf, Triratna, Stupa, Parasol.
Sources
- Dialogues of the Buddha, Part III (Lakkhana Suttanta, DN 30), T. W. and C. A. F. Rhys Davids (translators), 1921 (Sacred Books of the Buddhists, vol. IV), Oxford University Press, for the Pali Text Society; via the Internet Archive, XXX. Lakkhana Suttanta, §§2, 16 (D. iii. 144–145, 170)
- Yantra: From Sacred Geometry to Sacred Tattoos, Soonyata Mianlamai, 2 March 2023, Thailand Foundation, Symbols: Urna; Brief History of Yantra; Sak Yant; Values; Wai Khru Ceremony
- Thai unalom symbol (Unicode mailing list), James Clark, 1 July 2014, Unicode Consortium mailing list, via mail-archive.com, whole message
- Siamese State Ceremonies: Their History and Function, H. G. Quaritch Wales, 1931, Bernard Quaritch, London; via the Internet Archive, pp. 131 (The Tonsure Ceremony), 249 (The Swinging Festival)
- Study of the style and meaning of symbols representing the King on Pod Duang coins in the Rattanakosin period (King Rama I-King Rama IV), Manit Labilla, MA thesis, 2010 (B.E. 2553), Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University, English abstract
- From Red Unalom Society to Thai Red Cross Society, The Thai Red Cross Society, History
- Permanent Buddhism: Buddhist Tattoos, Mark Hay, 18 May 2016, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves or lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 14, 2026. How we research
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