There are a lot of hearts on a phone keyboard. Red one, pink one, sparkling one, growing one, broken one, two little ones orbiting each other. What there is not, anywhere in the standard set, is a heart that belongs to anybody in particular.
Our henna hands sticker started as one line in the commissioning brief:
A pair of hands patterned with henna/mehndi designs making a heart shape. This would be a great alternative to the classic heart emojis and also references weddings and parties in Arab, South Asian, East and North African, and diaspora cultures.
That is the whole idea, and the reason it survived the list: it does two jobs at once. It is a heart, so it works wherever a heart works. And it is a specific heart, drawn from something people actually do.
What mehndi is doing here
Henna — mehndi — is applied for weddings and celebrations across Arab, South Asian, and East and North African cultures, and everywhere those communities have since settled. The patterns are not decoration applied to an occasion; they are part of how the occasion is marked. A bride’s hands are painted the night before. Guests get their own.
We were deliberate about the brief naming four regions and the diaspora rather than one country. Mehndi is not one culture’s, and drawing it as though it were would have been the easy mistake.
From pencil to sticker
The first version was a pencil drawing: two hands, thumbs and forefingers meeting, the negative space between them making the heart. The patterns were drawn in properly — fingertips darkened, a paisley on each palm, banding down the fingers — rather than suggested with squiggles, because the whole argument of the sticker is that it is a real design and not a generic ornament.
The finished sticker keeps that. At the size it sends, you lose the fine linework, but you keep the shape, the darkened tips and the sense that somebody sat down and did this properly.
Where to find it
It is in the gestures collection, alongside a hijabi peace sign, a haka and two people in face masks tapping walking sticks — the greetings and blessings the standard keyboard leaves out.
It is free, like everything in the app. Get the app and it is there in the keyboard, ready to send anywhere you would have sent a red heart.
If your family does mehndi differently from how we have drawn it — and there are many ways — we would genuinely like to hear. Tell us.