喪
Symbols Memory
funeral
ㄙㄤ sāng
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 rites that see a body out. These characters are strongly inauspicious in Chinese and are avoided on display.
Before you commit
Choose with care喪 is genuinely unlucky to display. Chinese homes avoid the character entirely, and as sang it also means to lose heart - 喪氣, demoralised.
At small sizesTwelve strokes stacked vertically over a wide base. Legible small, though the stacked horizontals merge in fine work.
Cultural noteThis is one of the few concepts where the honest advice is not to ink it at all. Read sāng, 喪 is funerals and mourning, and no one puts that on display. Read sàng the same character means dejected, and mainland youth culture has worn it as a slogan (丧文化, and a pop-up chain called 丧茶) — but that is the burnout joke, not the funeral word.
Meaning
Funeral affairs; mourning; to lose by death.
The character in every word to do with a death in the family.
Other characters for “funeral”
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