Bow Symbols

What counts as a bow

“Bow” covers two meanings in text, and Unicode treats them separately. There is the bow as a tied ribbon, the pink knot on a gift or a hair clip, and the bow as a weapon with arrows. People searching for aesthetic symbols are almost always after the ribbon. People searching for gaming symbols sometimes want the weapon. This page serves both, and it says which characters are which.

The ribbon

🎀 is RIBBON (U+1F380). Despite the name, it is drawn as a bow on most platforms: a pink knot with two loops and two tails. It is an emoji, so the picture is drawn by your device and changes between systems. 🎗 is REMINDER RIBBON (U+1F397), the looped awareness ribbon used for causes, and it has the same colour-emoji treatment. Neither has a text form, so there is no way to make them follow your text colour.

The bowtie shapes

For a bow in text you need a stand-in. The common one is ⋈ (BOWTIE, U+22C8), a mathematical symbol made of two triangles meeting at their points. The outline resembles a bow tied in the middle, and in a bio the symbol is read that way. In relational algebra it means a natural join, so it will be read as a join in a database context. ⧓ (BLACK BOWTIE, U+29D3) is the filled version, ⧒ (BOWTIE WITH RIGHT HALF BLACK, U+29D2) is half and half, and ⨝ (JOIN, U+2A1D) is a bold variant. Their font coverage is thinner than ordinary symbols because they live in mathematical blocks, so they may show as boxes on older systems.

The shape is symmetrical, so it works as a small ornament or as a pair framing a name or a heart.

The weapon

🏹 is BOW AND ARROW (U+1F3F9), an emoji. The feathered arrows ➳ ➸ ➴ ➶ ➷ ➹ in the third group are from the Dingbats block. Their names, such as WHITE-FEATHERED RIGHTWARDS ARROW, describe the feathers at the tail. They are text characters, following your colour, and they work as arrows that look like they were shot from a bow. The arrow symbols page has the rest of the arrow family. 🙇 is PERSON BOWING DEEPLY, another meaning of the word, and a polite gesture in Japanese culture; it is included because people searching for bow sometimes expect it.

Text and emoji presentation

The emoji in the first group have no text form. The bowties and feathered arrows are text, and most have no emoji form. When you mix them in one line, as in the frame 🎀 ✿ 🎀, the ribbon emoji is coloured and the floret is not, which can look uneven. If you want one colour, use all text shapes, such as ⋈ ♡ ⋈. If you want colour, use emoji throughout.

The invisible selectors U+FE0E and U+FE0F work only on characters that have both forms, and neither the ribbon nor the bowtie is one of them, so you cannot convert a ribbon emoji to text.

Using bows in names and bios

Bows are a staple of cute and coquette styles. A small ribbon after a name, or a bowtie on either side of a heart, reads as sweet without being heavy. The frames in the last group use multi-character strings, so their labels are plain descriptions. The paired marks ୨୧ are Oriya digits, borrowed for their curled shapes, the same trick used in many aesthetic frames. The small brackets ⸜ ⸝ are low paraphrase brackets, punctuation from the Supplemental Punctuation block.

Platforms set their own rules for what a name or bio accepts and can change them. The emoji is the safest, and rarer characters are more variable. Test the result after saving. The cute symbols page has faces and hearts to go with a bow, and the text decorator can wrap names in bows and other symbols.

How to type a bow

1. Word on Windows. Type 22C8 and press Alt then X for ⋈. Use 29D3 for ⧓.
2. Windows emoji panel. Press the Windows key and the period key, then search ribbon for 🎀.
3. Mac. Control, Command and Space opens the emoji and symbols viewer. Search ribbon or bowtie.
4. iPhone and Android. The emoji keyboard has 🎀, found by searching ribbon. The text bowtie needs copy and paste or a text replacement such as “bow” that expands to ⋈.
5. Alt codes. None of the bow characters has a legacy Alt code.

Accessibility

A screen reader says “ribbon” for 🎀 and “bowtie” for ⋈. Both are short, but a frame of repeated bows is read as a repeated word. Put decoration after the name and keep it to one or two characters. Where a bow is only decoration, a text-based one is announced; an image would be skipped, so consider whether the announcement helps. The fancy text accessibility guide goes into this, and the boxes guide covers the rarer bowtie characters that may show as empty squares.