鶴
Symbols Animals
flying crane
ㄏㄜˋ hè
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 crane in flight: the standard Chinese emblem of long life and of an unworldly, scholarly bearing.
Before you commit
Choose with careCranes in China mean longevity and honoured old age, not freedom. They are a birthday wish, which is not what most people expect.
Pairs well with松鶴延年 — pine and crane, a long life; the pairing on birthday scrolls.
At small sizesTwenty-one strokes and dense on the right. It needs to be large or it turns into a smudge.
Meaning
Crane; long life, dignity, detachment from worldly things.
One character does the whole job, and the flight is already in the imagery.
Other characters for “flying crane”
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