鶴
Symbols Animals
crane
ㄏㄜˋ hè
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 red-crowned crane: the bird of long life, and the mount on which immortals travel.
Before you commit
Choose with careThe crane is above all a longevity symbol, so it reads as a wish for a long life. That is warm on a birthday scroll and a little odd on a young person's arm.
JapaneseJapanese uses this character unchanged — no shinjitai simplification, so the Japanese and traditional Chinese forms are identical. Read tsuru, and short for 折鶴, the paper crane of origami. Nothing in the shape of this character tells a viewer whether it was meant as Chinese or Japanese.
At small sizes21 strokes with a bird radical on the right. Far too dense to shrink; give it real space.
Cultural note駕鶴西歸, riding a crane westward, means someone has died — the Ministry of Education's dictionary adds that it is used chiefly in funeral inscriptions, and the funeral-flower trade files it under men who died at seventy or older. But that meaning belongs to the four-character phrase, not to the character: 漢典's entry for 鶴 carries no sense of death at all. The same character is the one in 松鶴延年, a birthday wish for long life.
Meaning
Crane.
The single character, used for the bird in every context.
Other characters for “crane”
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