祖
Symbols Memory
ancestor worship
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.
Tending the dead of your own line. This is living practice in Chinese families rather than a historical curiosity.
Before you commit
Choose with care祖 means ancestor or grandparent, not worship. It is also the 祖 of 祖國, motherland, so on its own it can read patriotically.
At small sizesTen strokes, altar radical beside a stack. Clean small if the horizontals on the right stay separated.
Cultural noteFamilies keep 牌位, wooden ancestral tablets, and set out food and incense at 清明 and new year. It is domestic routine, not religion in the Western sense.
Meaning
Ancestor; forebear; the grandparent generation.
The ancestors themselves - the people, not the rite.
Other characters for “ancestor worship”
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