柏
Symbols Nature
cypress
ㄅㄞˇ bǎi
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 dark evergreen planted at graves and paired with pine as a symbol of not giving way.
Before you commit
Choose with care柏 is not a precise translation of cypress. It stretches across cypresses, arborvitae and some cedars, so treat it as evergreen conifer rather than a species.
At small sizesNine strokes, wood radical plus a clean square. One of the easiest tree characters to render small.
Cultural note松柏 are planted at graves and temples, and the pairing carries endurance before it carries longevity — the line everyone knows is 歲寒，然後知松柏之後凋也, only when it turns cold do you see which trees hold their leaves. It is not gloom, but folk custom still treats these as trees for tombs rather than for the courtyard of a house.
Meaning
Cypress, arborvitae and related evergreens.
The standard character, though it covers a wider range of trees than English cypress.
Other characters for “cypress”
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