A file header in iOS looks like a file header in any other operating system. It can be whatever you want it to be and be as long or short as you wish. If you want it to be variable-length then one method is to start it with a magic number (which is actually a four-letter UTF-8 string that means something significant) and then perhaps a 32-bit header length, encoded in little-endian (as iOS and OSX are little-endian) and then whatever you need to encode.
For a sample of what file headers are currently in existence, look at the file
command and look at the files in /usr/share/file/magic/
. It often uses file-headers to determine the type of a file.