青
Symbols Animals
azure dragon
龍
ㄑㄧㄥ ㄌㄨㄥˊ qīng lóng
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 blue-green dragon of the east and of spring, one of the four celestial guardians of Chinese astronomy.
Before you commit
Choose with care青 spans blue, green and sometimes black depending on the word. Azure is only one reading; nobody will picture a bright sky blue.
Pairs well with白虎 — the west-guardian white tiger, the usual counterpart to this dragon.
At small sizes龍 is sixteen strokes and closes up fast. Below about 3 cm the interior goes solid.
Meaning
Azure Dragon: guardian of the east and of spring.
The standard name; 青 covers a blue-green range no single English word matches.
Other characters for “azure dragon”
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