auspicious

吉

ㄐㄧˊ jí

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

Layout

Promising good things. Chinese has two well-worn characters for it, both of them written everywhere at new year.

Before you commit

Choose with care吉 is extremely common and reads as conventional rather than striking - closer to lucky on a fortune cookie than to anything profound. That is fine, but it is not distinctive.

JapaneseJapanese uses 吉 for the good-luck grades on shrine fortune slips and as the name element yoshi. A Japanese reader will find it entirely familiar.

At small sizesSix strokes, a scholar element over a mouth. Simple, balanced and one of the safest choices at small sizes or on a curve.

Meaning

Auspicious, lucky, favourable; a good sign or a good day.

The word on every fortune slip and almanac in the language.

Other characters for “auspicious”

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.

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