龍
Symbols Animals
dragon
ㄌㄨㄥˊ lóng
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 Chinese dragon: a rain-bringing, river-dwelling power and an emblem of the emperor — not a monster to be slain.
Before you commit
Choose with careThe Chinese dragon is auspicious and benevolent, associated with rain and rivers. It carries none of the Western sense of a beast to be defeated.
At small sizes16 strokes in traditional form, dense on both halves. Below roughly two centimetres it fills in and loses its shape.
Cultural note龍 was the emperor's emblem and is still a strong marker of Chinese identity, as in 龍的傳人. Among Chinese speakers a dragon tattoo also reads as underworld imagery, and there is a common belief that it is a design you have to be strong enough to carry.
Meaning
Dragon.
The single character, one of the most recognised in the language.
Other characters for “dragon”
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