死
Symbols Life
death
ㄙˇ sǐ
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 end of life. Chinese has a blunt everyday character for it and several softer ones used out of respect for the dead.
Before you commit
Choose with care死 is genuinely taboo in social use. Chinese speakers avoid saying it about people they love and respect, and seeing it worn deliberately reads as harsh or crude rather than deep.
At small sizesSix strokes, open and clear. Technically an easy character to ink small - the difficulty here is social, not visual.
Cultural noteThe number four is avoided in buildings and phone numbers because it sounds like 死. This is real, everyday superstition, not folklore.
Meaning
Death; to die. Also used as an intensifier, as in bored to death.
The plain, hard word - avoided in polite speech about someone who has died.
Other characters for “death”
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.
Read more
This character is one of the ten in a longer piece on what a character carries beyond its dictionary meaning.
Related concepts