鄉
Symbols Relationships
hometown
ㄒㄧㄤ xiāng
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 town you are from and still feel tied to. The Chinese character for it carries a strong pull of homesickness with it.
Before you commit
Choose with care鄉 also means rural, and 鄉下 means the sticks. On its own it can read as countryside rather than as your hometown.
JapaneseJapanese writes this as 郷. The traditional 鄉 is legible there but looks archaic or distinctly Chinese.
At small sizesAbout a dozen strokes in a tall narrow frame. It stays legible small, but the middle section is fiddly on curved skin.
Meaning
Native place, home village; also the countryside.
The character inside almost every Chinese word about missing home.
Other characters for “hometown”
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