鴨
Symbols Animals
duck
ㄧㄚ yā
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 plain, everyday character in Chinese, and one that turns up in slang you may not want attached to you.
Before you commit
Choose with care鴨 has no poetic weight in Chinese. It reads as food, or as the joke about ducks lining up. It is one of the least romantic animal characters available.
At small sizes16 strokes and quite square. It survives small better than most bird characters because the strokes are mostly straight.
Cultural noteIn Chinese slang 鴨 means a male prostitute, paired with 雞 for a female one. It is common knowledge across Taiwan, Hong Kong and the mainland, not a regional usage, and it is a real risk with a visible tattoo.
Meaning
Duck. The single character.
Direct and universally understood; no literary layer at all.
Other characters for “duck”
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