魚
Symbols Animals
fish
ㄩˊ yú
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.
A plain pictograph of a fish, and a character Chinese readers immediately hear as a pun on abundance.
Before you commit
Choose with care魚 is completely literal. It says the animal, nothing more. If you want the wish for abundance behind the New Year fish, that meaning lives in 餘, not here.
JapaneseSame glyph in Japanese, read sakana or uo. It will read as Japanese just as easily.
At small sizes11 strokes with four dots underneath. Those dots merge into a bar quite quickly; keep it above roughly 3cm.
Meaning
Fish. A direct pictograph, head at the top, tail below.
Simple, ancient, and legible to every reader without explanation.
Other characters for “fish”
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