誠
Symbols Virtues
honesty
ㄔㄥˊ chéng
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.
Not lying, and not shading the truth either.
Before you commit
Choose with careThe dictionaries give 誠 three senses: inner sincerity (真心真意), being true and not deceiving (忠實無妄), and — as an adverb — indeed. None of them is telling the truth. That sense is 誠實, or 實. Alone, 誠 says you mean what you say, not that you say what is so.
JapaneseRead makoto in Japanese, and one of the most recognisable kanji in Japan: the Shinsengumi carried it in white or gold on a blood-red banner, and Makoto is a common given name. English-language kanji and tattoo sites almost always present 誠 through bushido and the Shinsengumi rather than through Chinese usage. Whether that makes a viewer read it as Japanese, we have no evidence either way — but it is the frame most Western material will hand them.
At small sizesThirteen strokes; the speech radical on the left closes up easily. Keep it reasonably large.
Meaning
Honest; sincere; true to one's word.
Speech that is completed by action.
Other characters for “honesty”
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.
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