祖
Symbols Spirit
ancestor spirit
ㄗㄨˇ zǔ
Two versions of the same picture, and both are free with no account and no watermark. The first has no background at all, which is the one to send your artist — but a phone or computer photo viewer set to dark will show black strokes on dark grey and it can look like nothing downloaded. If that happens, use the second one: identical characters on a plain white background. Either way you get the characters on their own — the square and the faint guide lines you see above are not in the file. Each character is 1000px, so a two-character download is 2000×1000, and the script and layout are the ones you picked.
Script
Characters
Same in both
Layout
Rubbing mode: white on black, as a stone rubbing. The download is unaffected.
The dead of your own family, still present and still owed something. Chinese treats this as an ongoing relationship rather than a memory.
Before you commit
Choose with care祖 on its own means forebear or founder. It opens 祖國, motherland, and 祖父, grandfather, so it reads as lineage rather than as a spirit you can address.
At small sizesAround ten strokes in a clean left-right split with a stack of horizontals on the right. Those merge first when inked small.
Cultural noteHan families honour ancestors at a tablet, 牌位, and sweep the graves at 清明. The relationship runs both ways - the dead are fed, and they look after you.
Meaning
Ancestor, forebear; the founder of a line.
The core character, in 祖先 ancestors and 祖父 grandfather alike.
Other characters for “ancestor spirit”
What to do next
Pick the script and layout you want above, download the PNG, and send that file to your artist. Ask them to work from the file rather than redrawing the character freehand — that is where strokes go missing.
Related concepts