螢
Symbols Animals
firefly
ㄧㄥˊ yíng
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 firefly: in Chinese it is tied to studying by its light, and so to poverty, diligence and late summer.
Before you commit
Choose with careThe classical association is 囊螢映雪 — a poor student reading by fireflies in a bag and by the light off snow. Hardship and diligence, not whimsy.
JapaneseWritten 蛍 in modern Japanese and read hotaru. The traditional form is understood there but looks old-fashioned.
At small sizesThe fire elements above the insect are fine work. Under about 3 cm the top half becomes one dark block.
Meaning
Firefly.
One character, written with fire elements above the insect, and used in every compound.
Other characters for “firefly”
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.
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