心
Symbols Spirit
heart
ㄒㄧㄣ xīn
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.
The heart, and in Chinese also the mind - one character carries feeling, thought and intention together.
Before you commit
Choose with care心 is the most common character in this whole subject area, which makes it safe and also makes it plain. It is the tattoo everyone has considered.
JapaneseIdentical in Japanese, read kokoro, and just as central there. Nothing about it reads as Chinese rather than Japanese.
At small sizesFour strokes - three dots and a hook. It scales down further than almost anything else and suits curved placement.
Meaning
Heart; mind; the centre of a person or of a thing.
A single character holding what English splits between heart and mind.
Other characters for “heart”
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