永
Symbols Life
eternity of time
ㄩㄥˇ yǒng
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.
Time without end. Chinese splits the idea into forever, as duration, and constancy, as never changing.
Before you commit
Choose with care永 is an adjective and an adverb, not a noun. It says forever, not eternity, and a reader will expect another character after it.
Cultural note永 is the character calligraphers practise first: its eight movements cover most of the basic brush strokes, taught as the 永字八法.
At small sizesFive sweeping strokes. Excellent small, and the diagonals suit curved placements such as a wrist or a ribcage.
Meaning
Forever, perpetual, everlasting.
The plainest word for endless time, and clean as a single glyph.
Other characters for “eternity of time”
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