蟹
Symbols Animals
crab
ㄒㄧㄝˋ xiè
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.
A clean character for the animal, tied to the idea of moving sideways and doing as you please.
Before you commit
Choose with care蟹 is tied to 橫行, moving sideways, which in Chinese means throwing your weight around unchecked. Depending on the reader that is either swagger or thuggishness.
At small sizes19 strokes with the insect radical stacked underneath. Crowded; this needs a decent size to stay readable.
Cultural noteAvoid 河蟹 unless you know what you are doing. It sounds like 和諧, harmonious, and has been mainland internet slang for content being censored since around 2008.
Meaning
Crab. The single character.
Standard, legible, and used in every crab compound.
Other characters for “crab”
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