Inkoya

Symbols Protection

gate

門

ㄇㄣˊ mén

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

Layout

The opening you pass through, and by extension a threshold or a lineage. In Chinese the gate character carries all three at once.

Before you commit

Choose with care門 also means the group you belong to - a school, a trade, a family line. That second reading is strong, and many will see it before they see a gate.

JapaneseJapanese uses the same traditional glyph 門 (mon), with the same senses of gate and lineage. It reads correctly in both languages.

At small sizesEight strokes forming a tall open frame. Very clean small, and the symmetry sits well on a spine or the back of an arm.

Meaning

A gate or door; also a family line, a school of thought, a category.

A drawing of a pair of doors, still recognisable in the modern shape.

Other characters for “gate”

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.

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