苦
Symbols Life
hardship
ㄎㄨˇ kǔ
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.
A hard life or a hard stretch of one. Chinese distinguishes bitterness endured, difficulty of the task, and toil.
Before you commit
Choose with care苦 is the Buddhist word for the suffering inherent in existence, so it reads heavier than English hardship. It is also simply the word for bitter food.
Pairs well with吃苦 means to endure hardship and is genuinely respected as a quality. 苦盡甘來, bitterness ends and sweetness comes, is the phrase people quote.
At small sizesNine strokes, the grass radical over a mouth. Clean small, though the two top verticals can merge if inked thickly.
Meaning
Bitter; suffering, hardship, painful effort.
The taste of bitterness used for everything a person has to endure.
Other characters for “hardship”
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