柔
Symbols Virtues
gentleness
ㄖㄡˊ róu
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.
Softness of manner that comes from choice rather than from lacking force.
Before you commit
Choose with care柔 alone can read as soft or weak, and in some contexts as feminine in an old-fashioned way. 溫柔 is unambiguously warm; 柔韌 makes the strength explicit.
At small sizesNine strokes, top-heavy over a wood element. Reasonably clean small, though the lower strokes can merge.
Cultural note柔能克剛, the soft can overcome the hard, is a well-known saying and the reason 柔 is not read as weakness by educated readers.
Meaning
Soft, gentle, supple; yielding rather than rigid.
The core character, and philosophically the strong kind of soft.
Other characters for “gentleness”
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