Shin is one of seven Hebrew letters, recalled by the mnemonic shatnez getz, that Jewish law requires a scribe to crown with three small decorative strokes called tagin in a Torah scroll, tefillin or mezuzah, a rule fixed in the Talmud at Menachot 29b. Shin also appears embossed directly on the small leather box worn on the head during Jewish prayer, tefillin shel rosh, where tradition specifies a Shin with three strokes on one side and, on many examples, four on the other, read by commentators as alluding to the letter's place in divine names and in the Priestly Blessing. That blessing is given with the hands arranged so that the fingers form a shape resembling Shin, a gesture the actor Leonard Nimoy has said he adapted, from a childhood memory of watching the ritual in synagogue, into the raised-hand Vulcan salute of the Star Trek television series, a modern popular-culture borrowing with no older tradition behind it beyond Nimoy's own account of its origin.
Shin's ordinary sound value and its place among the Sefer Yetzirah's three mother letters are discussed elsewhere in this atlas, and unlike most of the seven crowned letters, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, its appearance on tefillin gives it a second, everyday visibility on the body of an observant worshipper that most Hebrew letters never acquire outside the page of a scroll or a printed book.