Up-left arrow

It is a pointer: look up and to the left of it. The arrow carries no mood and no hidden message. Its job is the same as a finger on a map: direct your eyes to a spot. Unicode names it North West Arrow because it belongs to a set of eight arrows named after compass points, one for every direction, and the emoji keyboard offers all eight.

Because the direction is fixed but the target is not, the meaning changes with what surrounds it. Next to a photo it points at the top-left corner; under a long thread it points back at an earlier message; on a page with buttons it points at a button. Readers who meet ↖️ in a message should treat it as "this thing here" and find the thing.

What is someone pointing at when they send ↖️?

Usually their own name or picture at the top of the post. On most social apps and in group chats, the sender's picture and name sit at the top left of a post or message bubble. So "that's me ↖️", "follow ↖️" or "tap the name ↖️" are the everyday uses: the arrow says the author is the person you should notice. It also shows up as "back ↖️" in instructions, since the back button on phones is usually in the top-left corner, and beside screenshots as a cheap way to circle a detail without an editing app.

The catch is that the arrow points at a place on the sender's screen, not on yours. If the message is forwarded, quoted or opened in a different app, the target may have moved, and in languages written right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew, the whole interface is mirrored and the name may sit on the right. When nothing obvious sits up-left of the arrow, it is fine to ask what they mean.