塵
Symbols Nature
dust
ㄔㄣˊ chén
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.
Fine particles in the air, and in Buddhist usage the whole grubby business of worldly life.
Before you commit
Choose with care塵 is worth choosing precisely because of its second meaning. 出塵 means to rise above the world; 紅塵 means to be deep in it. Plain dirt is 灰塵.
JapaneseThe same glyph is read chiri in Japanese, where it means rubbish or litter in ordinary use. The lofty reading does not travel.
At small sizesFourteen strokes, a deer over earth. The upper half crowds when reduced, so keep it reasonably large.
Meaning
Dust; also the mortal world and its entanglements.
Both readings are live, which makes it far richer than plain dust.
Other characters for “dust”
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