魔
Symbols Spirit
demon
ㄇㄛˊ mó
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 malign spirit. Chinese separates the tempter of Buddhist teaching, the shape-shifting animal spirit and the plain ghost.
Before you commit
Choose with care魔 has drifted a long way. 魔術 is stage magic, 魔法 is fantasy magic, and it works as a suffix for obsession. It can read as playful before it reads as dark.
JapaneseJapanese uses 魔 in exactly the same range, games and manga included, so the character reads across both languages.
At small sizesAround twenty-one strokes with a full 鬼 tucked under a wide cover. It goes solid at small size faster than almost anything else here.
Meaning
A demon; Mara the tempter. Also magic, and obsession.
The Buddhist demon, which works on the mind rather than the body.
Other characters for “demon”
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