福
Symbols Life
fortune
ㄈㄨˊ fú
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.
Good things arriving from outside your control. Chinese separates blessing, luck and material wealth into different characters.
Before you commit
Choose with care福 is warm and generic - closer to blessing and contentment than to a windfall. It is not a word about money.
At small sizesFourteen strokes with a busy right side. Legible small, but the stacked boxes on the right can close up in fine linework.
Cultural noteAt Lunar New Year 福 goes up all over the house, often upside down, because 倒 puns on 到, arrived — though folklorists keep insisting the inverted one belongs on bins and water vats and that the front door 福 should be the right way up. It is a genuinely beloved character rather than a fashionable one.
Meaning
Good fortune, blessing, well-being. The classic auspicious character.
The single most common good-luck character in Chinese life, seen on every door at New Year.
Other characters for “fortune”
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