Braille pattern dots-12345

It is Q, the cell missing only its bottom-right dot. A braille cell has six dot positions in two columns: 1-2-3 down the left, 4-5-6 down the right. Raise all but dot 6 and you get Q. English, French, German, Spanish and other Latin-alphabet braille codes share this letter, so Q in braille is the same across them.

Braille grew from a raised-dot ‘night writing’ system Charles Barbier showed at the Paris school for blind youth around 1821. Louis Braille, a pupil there, shrank it to a cell a fingertip covers in one touch. In contracted English braille, used in most books, a lone ⠟ stands for the word “quite”; inside a word it is just q.

Why does ⠟ show up in messages and pictures?

Usually as a pixel in dot art, not as braille. The 256 braille patterns give a tiny grid of dots per character, so people build pictures, faces and memes from them in chats, comments and usernames. In such art ⠟ is just a dense block of dots and spells nothing.

Used one at a time, it can also appear as a decorative symbol or as a puzzle clue for the letter Q.