敗
Symbols Life
failure
ㄅㄞˋ bài
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.
Not getting what you aimed at, or being beaten. Chinese has a blunt single character for defeat and a plainer two-character word for failing.
Before you commit
Choose with care敗 is strongly negative and carries decay as a secondary sense - 腐敗 is corruption. Chinese readers do not read failure as a badge of experience the way English speakers sometimes do.
At small sizesEleven strokes, split cleanly left and right. Legible small, though the left side crowds in fine work.
Cultural noteChinese does say 失敗為成功之母, but the value sits in what you do next, not in the failure itself. If your intent is resilience, 屢敗屢戰 or simply 毅 will land as intended where a bare 敗 will not.
Meaning
To be defeated; to fail; to spoil or rot.
The defeat character - it sits in both losing a battle and a plan going bad.
Other characters for “failure”
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