初
Symbols Emotions
first love
戀
ㄔㄨ ㄌㄧㄢˋ chū liàn
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 first person you loved, and everything that phrase quietly implies.
Before you commit
Choose with care初 alone just means first, and 戀 alone is romance in general. Only the pair means first love, so a single character will not do it.
At small sizes初 is 8 strokes and clean; 戀 is 23 and very dense. The pair is badly unbalanced at small scale.
Cultural note初戀 is warm and a little wistful in Chinese — it carries the assumption that the love ended, which is why it is used so often in songs.
Meaning
First love.
The set phrase; no Chinese reader needs a second to parse it.
Other characters for “first love”
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