友
Symbols Relationships
friendship
情
ㄧㄡˇ ㄑㄧㄥˊ yǒu qíng
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 bond between friends. 友 on its own is the friend rather than the tie between them, so modern Chinese names the feeling with a two-character word.
Before you commit
Choose with care友情 and 友誼 both mean friendship. 友情 is the warmer of the two, the feeling itself; 友誼 is more formal and is the one that turns up on monuments and in diplomacy. 友 on its own is the friend, not the friendship.
Cultural note義氣 — the loyalty sworn friends owe one another — is the value Chinese stories attach to friendship. It is admired, and it carries a whiff of the underworld.
At small sizesTwo characters and fifteen strokes, unevenly split: 友 is four, 情 is eleven, so the second half carries most of the detail. Give it room, or take 友 alone, which is four strokes of crossing diagonals and very forgiving on curved skin.
Meaning
Friendship; the affection between friends.
The ordinary modern word for the feeling itself. 友 alone names the person, not the bond.
Other characters for “friendship”
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