鵝
Symbols Animals
goose
ㄜˊ é
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.
Chinese splits the domestic goose from the wild goose, and only the wild one carries poetry.
Before you commit
Choose with care鵝 is livestock. If you want the goose of poetry, the one flying south in a line, that is 雁, and the two are not interchangeable in a Chinese reader's mind.
At small sizes18 strokes and heavy on the right. 雁 at 12 strokes is a noticeably cleaner choice if the placement is small.
Cultural noteWild geese mate for life, so a pair of geese was a traditional betrothal gift. 雁 therefore reads as constancy, which 鵝 does not.
Meaning
Goose, the domestic farmyard bird.
The literal animal; also the character the calligrapher Wang Xizhi loved.
Other characters for “goose”
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