天
Symbols Life
calling
職
ㄊㄧㄢ ㄓˊ tiān zhí
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.
Work you feel you were meant for. Chinese has a precise word for it, and that word credits heaven with the assignment.
Before you commit
Choose with care天職 is used of professions with a duty attached — doctors, teachers, soldiers. It reads as serious obligation, not as following your bliss.
JapaneseJapanese has 天職 for vocation, but it is a homophone of 転職, changing jobs. A Japanese reader hears both words at once.
At small sizesTwenty-two strokes over two characters. 職 is crowded on the right, and the ear radical closes up if you go small.
Meaning
One's calling; the duty heaven gave you to do.
The exact idea — a vocation rather than a job, and widely understood.
Other characters for “calling”
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