父
Symbols Relationships
father
ㄈㄨˋ fù
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.
The man who raised you. As with mother, Chinese keeps the formal written word apart from what a child actually says.
Before you commit
Choose with care父 is formal and slightly cold. It is the word on a form, not the word a child uses; 爸 is where the affection is.
Cultural note嚴父慈母, the strict father and the loving mother, is the traditional pairing, and 嚴 there is about holding to a standard rather than about temper. It is also a template Chinese readers now argue with, so it reads as traditional rather than neutral.
At small sizesFour strokes, all crossing diagonals. Very clean small, and the open shape suits curved placements.
Meaning
Father; paternal.
The written, formal character, used in 父親 and on documents.
Other characters for “father”
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