Pirate emoji and what they mean
Pirate flag is the one emoji that says pirate on its own. It shows a white skull and crossbones on a black flag, the Jolly Roger, and it joined Emoji 11.0 in 2018 together with parrot and compass. Under the hood it is a sequence: black flag joined to skull and crossbones with an invisible joiner, which is why a very old phone shows it as two separate pictures.
Skull and crossbones is older than emoji itself: Unicode added it in 1993 as a poison and danger sign, and it became an emoji in 2015. People use it as a darker cousin of skull, for "dead from laughing", for poison and for anything piratical. Skull alone is the everyday "I'm dead" reaction and sits in the Skull & Death collection too; here it stands for bones, curses and dead men who tell no tales, next to bone, the gold tooth, coffin and the ghost ship.
The rest of the kit is literal: anchor, sailboat and ship for the vessel, world map and scroll for the treasure map, compass and telescope (the spyglass) for finding the way, desert island and palm tree for where the gold is buried, and crossed swords, dagger and bomb for the fight when you get there.
The one-eyed pirate face, the hook and the peg leg
There is no pirate face emoji with an eye patch, which is why "pirate emoji one eye" is one of the most typed searches around this topic. The stand-ins people use are winking face (one eye shut), face with monocle (one eye covered) and eye on its own, usually next to so the meaning is clear. A gruff captain is person with a beard, a villainous one supervillain or , and index pointing at the viewer is "you, swab the deck".
The classic pirate body parts have emoji of their own. hook is Captain Hook's hand, mechanical leg is the closest thing to a peg leg, tooth is the gold tooth, and parrot sits on the shoulder. The parrot-on-the-shoulder image comes from Long John Silver and his parrot Captain Flint in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883), the book that also gave us the treasure map with an X on it, so cross mark means "X marks the spot". crocodile is Captain Hook's ticking nemesis from Peter Pan; monkey and rat are the ship's other passengers.
Ship, sea and treasure emoji
For the ship itself, sailboat is the closest to a tall ship, ship is bigger and more modern, and person rowing boat or canoe is the longboat that takes the crew ashore. There is no ship's wheel emoji, so people borrow wheel of dharma, a Buddhist symbol that happens to look exactly like a helm, or the plain text helm symbol, a technical character that some keyboards print on the Control key. knot, bucket, broom (swab the deck), wood (the plank) and oil drum (the rum barrel) finish the deck. The Boat & Ship collection has every other vessel.
Weather at sea is where pirate stories turn: water wave, wind in the sails, cyclone, tornado, and storm clouds, lightning, fog, then a full moon and sunrise for the morning after. Below the waves: shark, octopus and squid (the kraken), whale, turtle, crab and fish; the Ocean & Sea collection goes deeper.
Treasure finally has its own emoji: treasure chest was approved in Emoji 17.0 in 2025, so many phones still show it as an empty box, and money bag, coin and gem stone remain the safe way to say loot. Add crown, ring and oyster for pearls, old key, locked and chains for the chest, and shovel, pick and footprints for the dig. hourglass is the old pirate-flag symbol for "your time is running out".
Pirate text symbols for usernames and bios
A few pirate symbols are plain text characters, so they keep their look in game names, Discord handles and places that strip colour emoji. black skull and crossbones and no piracy (a skull and crossbones struck through) both came to Unicode in 2014 from the Wingdings and Webdings fonts; ⚑ and ⚐ are text flags; ⎈ is the helm; and ☠ is the skull and crossbones in its text form, which most apps draw in the colour of the surrounding text rather than as a picture. Lines like ⚑ ☠ ⚑ or ⎈ ☠ ⚓ work as a pirate divider or a clan tag.
On the emoji side, black flag and white flag carry real pirate meaning: a black flag was the signal to surrender, and is the white flag of parley or of a ship striking its colours. Together with they are the three pieces the pirate flag emoji is built from.
Jolly Roger history and Talk Like a Pirate Day
The Jolly Roger belongs to the Golden Age of Piracy, roughly the 1650s to the 1730s, when crews from Nassau, Tortuga and Port Royal raided the Caribbean and the Atlantic. Each captain flew his own design; the skull above two crossed swords sailed with Calico Jack Rackham, and skulls, crossed bones, hourglasses and bleeding hearts appeared in various mixes. The plain skull-and-crossbones version became the pirate flag in books and films, and it is the one Unicode chose for . Where the name Jolly Roger comes from is not settled; one theory derives it from the French joli rouge, "pretty red", because a red flag meant no mercy would be given.
International Talk Like a Pirate Day falls on 19 September. Two friends in Oregon, John Baur and Mark Summers, invented it in 1995, and it went worldwide in 2002 after the humorist Dave Barry wrote about it. It is the day fill feeds, usually with "Ahoy", "Arr" and "Shiver me timbers". Fans of Pittsburgh Pirates baseball, Tampa Bay Buccaneers football and the anime One Piece, whose crews each fly their own Jolly Roger, use the same flag year round.
Symbols
111Click a symbol to copy it and open its page.
The flag and the skull
the Jolly Roger as emoji, as text, and the bones behind it
The crew
faces for the one-eyed pirate, the captain, hook, peg leg and parrot
Treasure hunt
from the map to the chest
How to use them
6 situationsClick to copyPirate Emoji combos
15Worth knowing
- has no code point of its own: it is black flag skull and crossbones glued with a zero-width joiner, added in 2018. A phone that doesn't know the recipe shows the two halves side by side.
- existed as a poison warning sign in Unicode from 1993, twenty-two years before it became a colour emoji in 2015.
- is a real Unicode character called NO PIRACY, a skull and crossbones crossed out, inherited from Microsoft's Webdings font in 2014.
- , the Buddhist wheel of dharma, is the most common stand-in for a ship's wheel because no helm emoji exists; the text character is actually named HELM SYMBOL and appears on some Control keys.
- The treasure chest emoji only arrived with Emoji 17.0 in 2025, so pirates had to make do with and for the first fifteen years of emoji.
Questions people ask
8Is there a pirate emoji?
There is no pirate person emoji, but there is a pirate flag emoji, plus skull and crossbones, parrot, anchor, dagger and treasure chest. For a pirate face people combine or with and .
How do I copy and paste pirate emoji?
Tap or click any emoji in the grid to copy it, then paste it into your message, caption or username. Each combo above copies as one piece.
What does the pirate flag emoji mean?
is the Jolly Roger. It means pirates, Talk Like a Pirate Day and anything swashbuckling, and in chat it often signals a rebel mood, a raid on the fridge or a nod to pirating films and games. From a guy or a girl it is usually playful, not a threat.
Is there a pirate emoji on iPhone?
Yes. has been in the iPhone keyboard since iOS 12.1 in late 2018. Search "pirate" in the emoji keyboard, or copy it from this page.
What is the one eye pirate emoji?
There is no eye-patch emoji. The usual one-eyed pirate is winking face or face with monocle next to , for example .
What is the difference between and ?
skull is a plain skull and mostly means "I'm dead" (laughing). skull and crossbones adds the bones, started life as a poison sign and reads as pirate, poison or real danger.
Is there a pirate ship emoji or a ship wheel emoji?
Not exactly. sailboat and ship stand in for the pirate ship, and wheel of dharma or the text symbol stand in for the ship's wheel.
Are there pirate text symbols?
Yes: are plain Unicode characters that work in game names and bios where colour emoji are stripped.
