Locked With Pen Emoji

A closed padlock with a fountain pen nib crossing in front of it. 🔏 is the "signed and sealed" member of the lock emoji family. The lock means this thing is secure; the pen means someone has signed their name to it. Put them together and you get the emoji for digital signatures, notarized documents, and anything with a legal weight to it.

It's by far the rarest lock of the four. Most people reach for 🔒 (just locked) or 🔐 (locked with a key) before they think of this one. That's partly because its meaning is narrower, and partly because its meaning is technical. The Unicode proposal originally named it "Lock with Ink Pen" and tied it to public-key cryptography, where a private key signs a document and a public key verifies the signature was real. In other words, 🔏 was born as the emoji for digital certificates.

In texting it pulls a double shift. Literal uses cover signed contracts, NDAs, terms of service, "read but do not edit" files, and the moment you hit submit on a legal form. Slang uses riff on "locked in", the Gen Z phrase for hyper focused work, where the pen adds a study or writing angle that 🔒 alone doesn't carry.

🔏 has two lives. In professional settings it sits in email signatures, legal software branding, and Slack threads about paperwork ("got the signed NDA 🔏"). In casual Gen Z texting it rides the "locked in" wave, the self-improvement trend where people announce their three-month study grinds with captions like "september lock in 🔏" or "no distractions 🔏📚." The pen sells the writing and studying angle better than the plain 🔒.

Two platforms refuse to let you use it for spoofing. X (formerly Twitter) blocks 🔏, 🔒, 🔐, and 🔓 from display names and bios because the site already uses a lock icon to mark protected accounts, and allowing the emoji would let anyone fake private-account status. Apple Safari, meanwhile, doesn't render 🔏 in page titles, presumably so phishing sites can't dress up a tab with a fake "secure document" badge. Two of the biggest platforms on the internet quietly treat this specific emoji as a phishing risk.

On Instagram and TikTok it's niche but consistent. Studygram accounts pair it with 📓 and ☕ for "locked in" study aesthetic posts. Legal and finance creators use it for NDA jokes and contract content. It almost never shows up in dating or flirty texts, which sets it apart from its siblings 🔒 and 🔐.

🔏 is a byproduct of the encryption era. When the Unicode 6.0 spec arrived in 2010, the subcommittee borrowed its lock emojis from existing Japanese carrier emoji sets that had been in use since the late 1990s. Those carriers needed a way to signal "signed document" in mobile email clients for enterprise customers, so alongside 🔒 LOCKLOCK and 🔓 OPEN LOCKOPEN LOCK, they shipped LOCK WITH INK PENLOCK WITH INK PEN (later renamed to "Locked with Pen"). The pen was chosen over other options because public-key cryptography, which Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman described in 1976, had already been using a pen-and-lock motif in textbook diagrams for decades.

The fountain pen nib is also a callback to real-world legal signing ceremonies. Eisenhower used a Parker 51 to sign the German Instrument of Surrender in 1945. David Lloyd George used a gold Waterman for the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The fountain pen became the symbolic instrument of formal commitment, and the emoji inherits that weight.

The emoji landed in 2010 just before the HTTPS-everywhere push took over browsers. For a moment, it looked like 🔏 might become a mainstream UI icon alongside 🔒. It didn't. Web browsers settled on the plain padlock for encrypted connections, leaving 🔏 stuck in a narrow role: a niche symbol for signed paperwork that never quite broke through into everyday texting.

1. 1976Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman publish New Directions in Cryptography, establishing the theoretical basis for digital signatures↗
2. 1984Lewis Waterman's descendants sell the Waterman Pen Company; the fountain pen era that inspired the emoji's nib design is fading into ceremony and symbolism↗
3. 2000U.S. E-Sign Act passes, giving electronic signatures the same legal weight as handwritten ones↗
4. 2010Unicode 6.0 standardizes U+1F50F LOCK WITH INK PEN alongside U+1F512 LOCK, U+1F513 OPEN LOCK, and U+1F510 CLOSED LOCK WITH KEY↗
5. 2015Emoji 1.0 formalizes the set; X (then Twitter) begins blocking all four lock emojis from usernames↗
6. 2023Canadian court rules a 👍 emoji can function as an e-signature in South West Terminal Ltd v. Achter Land, broadening the legal definition toward any emoji↗
7. 2024"The Great Lock In" Gen Z trend takes off on TikTok; 🔏 finds new casual usage as a studygram and grindset emoji↗

• •🔏 is banned from display names on X (formerly Twitter) along with the other three lock emojis (🔒, 🔐, 🔓) to prevent users from faking the platform's private-account indicator.
• •Apple's Safari browser does not render 🔏 inside a page's `<title>` tag. Put it in the body, no problem. Put it in the tab title, it vanishes. The prevailing theory is that a lock-plus-pen emoji in a tab title could be used to fake a security badge and trick users into trusting phishing sites.
• •The original Unicode name was "Lock with Ink Pen", a direct reference to public-key cryptography and digital signatures. Most platforms simplified the name to "Locked with Pen" after 2015 to make it less technical.
• •The emoji was approved in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) alongside the other three lock emojis. All four came out of Japanese carrier emoji sets that had been circulating on Japanese mobile phones since the late 1990s.
• •In June 2023, a Canadian court ruled that a 👍 emoji counted as a valid e-signature for a $60,000+ grain contract. The decision made international headlines and sparked debate over whether 🔏 and other "official looking" emojis could have stronger signing authority.
• •Gen Z's "lock in" slang originally came from competitive gaming, where players would "lock in" their character or strategy before a match. The phrase migrated to studying and fitness around 2023, and 🔏 became the "studying" flavor of the trend because of the pen.
• •Most platforms render 🔏 with a fountain pen nib, but on older Android versions the pen looked more like a ballpoint. Apple kept the nib consistent since iOS 10.2.
• •Out of the four lock emojis, 🔏 is the rarest in measured usage. Unicode's emoji frequency data puts it several frequency tiers below 🔒, largely because its meaning is so narrow.
• •The 2000 U.S. E-Sign Act gave electronic signatures the same legal weight as handwritten ones, creating the legal environment that made a symbol like 🔏 meaningful in the first place.

• •🔏 isn't a cryptographic signature. Using it in a contract email doesn't make the contract binding. It's a symbol for signing, not an act of signing.
• •It's not the right emoji for relationship status. The 🔒/🔓 convention for "taken/single" doesn't extend to 🔏, and using it that way reads as confusing.
• •It's not a notary stamp or seal. If you want the seal angle, 🧾 (receipt) or 📜 (scroll) with ✅ works better. 🔏 is about the signature, not the stamp.

• •Canadian thumbs-up lawsuit (2023). In South West Terminal Ltd v. Achter Land, a Saskatchewan farmer was held to a grain contract he'd responded to with 👍. The judge ruled the emoji met the intent-to-sign bar under Canadian law. The case made international headlines and pulled 🔏 into broader conversations about emoji signatures.
• •The Great Lock In (2024-2025). Gen Z's three-month focus challenge running September through December. Creators used 🔏 in captions to signal writing, studying, or project focus, especially on studygram and fitness accounts.
• •Eisenhower's Parker 51 (1945). General Dwight Eisenhower signed the German Instrument of Surrender with a Parker 51 fountain pen in Reims, France on May 7, 1945. That nib is the ancestor of the pen in 🔏.
• •Treaty of Versailles (1919). David Lloyd George used a gold Waterman fountain pen to sign the treaty that formally ended WWI, cementing the fountain pen as the instrument of consequential signatures.

• •The codepoint is U+1F50FU+1F50F, shortcode :lock_with_ink_pen::lock_with_ink_pen: on most platforms. Note the underscore name preserves the original Unicode "Lock with Ink Pen" label even after the display name was softened.
• •If you're building a page that tells users their document is signed, don't rely on 🔏 alone. Apple Safari doesn't render it in the <title><title> element and X strips it from usernames. Use text plus emoji, never emoji alone.
• •The full lock emoji family: U+1F512U+1F512 🔒, U+1F513U+1F513 🔓, U+1F510U+1F510 🔐, U+1F50FU+1F50F 🔏. All four shipped together in Unicode 6.0, all four are banned from X display names, and only 🔏 gets the Safari title-tag treatment.
• •For actual cryptographic signing in code, 🔏 is decorative only. The tooling is in openpgp.jsopenpgp.js, node-forgenode-forge, WebCrypto API, or a provider like DocuSign. The emoji is a label, not an implementation.

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.