韌
Symbols Virtues
grit
ㄖㄣˋ rèn
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.
Sticking with something hard for a long time. This is an English idea with no exact Chinese single character.
Before you commit
Choose with careThere is no one character for grit. 韌 and 毅 each carry about half of it. If you want the whole idea, use 堅韌 and accept two characters. Taiwan also writes this sense as 拚, read pàn — the two are separate characters that have been used interchangeably for a long time, and 拼 is what almost everyone writes on both sides.
Pairs well with堅韌不拔, tough and immovable, is the standard four-character phrase.
At small sizes韌 is twelve strokes with a cramped left side. It closes up when inked small.
Meaning
Tough and flexible; hard to tear.
The closest single character: it takes strain and keeps going.
Other characters for “grit”
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