祖
Symbols Relationships
ancestors
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 people your line descends from. In Chinese these are not an abstraction: they are named, remembered and offered food.
Before you commit
Choose with care祖 also means grandfather and founder. Alone, a reader may take it either way, which is close enough for most purposes but not exact.
Cultural noteAncestors are honoured at 清明, when families sweep the graves, and on tablets kept at home. Wearing 祖 reads as filial rather than merely genealogical.
At small sizesTen strokes, altar radical left and a stack of horizontals right. It holds up small as long as those horizontals stay separated.
Meaning
Ancestor, forefather; also grandfather, and the founder of a line.
The ancestor character, and the one on every ancestral tablet.
Other characters for “ancestors”
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