象
Symbols Animals
elephant
ㄒㄧㄤˋ xiàng
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.
One of the most common characters in Chinese, though far more often read as image or likeness than as the animal.
Before you commit
Choose with careThis is the real catch. A Chinese reader seeing 象 alone is at least as likely to read image, form or symbol as elephant. For the animal, 大象 is far clearer.
At small sizes12 strokes with a long curved tail at the bottom. That tail is what makes it readable, so do not let it get cramped.
Cultural noteAn elephant carrying a vase is a rebus. 瓶, vase, sounds like 平, peace, and 象 itself puns on 祥, auspicious, which together give 太平有象. None of that wordplay survives into the bare character.
Meaning
Elephant; also image, form, appearance, phenomenon.
A genuine pictograph, and a character every reader knows well.
Other characters for “elephant”
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