兄
Symbols Relationships
brotherhood
弟
ㄒㄩㄥ ㄉㄧˋ xiōng dì
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.
Loyalty between men who need not be related. Chinese says it with the word for brothers, and that word carries baggage.
Before you commit
Choose with careIn Taiwan and Hong Kong 兄弟 is also everyday slang for gang members. Context usually carries it, but the reading is real and common.
Cultural note義結金蘭, sworn brotherhood, is the tradition behind this idea: friends binding themselves as kin, most famously in the Three Kingdoms story.
At small sizesTwelve strokes over two open, simple characters. One of the easier pairs to place small or on a curve.
Meaning
Brothers; also close male friends who treat each other as kin.
The word used for real brothers and for sworn ones alike.
Other characters for “brotherhood”
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