馬
Symbols Animals
horse
ㄇㄚˇ mǎ
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 horse: speed, stamina and getting there — the animal Chinese associates with success arriving quickly.
Before you commit
Choose with care馬 is completely ordinary — it is also a common surname and appears in 馬馬虎虎, meaning so-so. 駿 or 驥 reads far more considered.
Japanese馬 is shared, read uma or ba, with the same meaning. The single glyph will not read as specifically Chinese.
Cultural note馬到成功, success the moment the horse arrives, is a standard New Year wish. Horse imagery reads as speed and good fortune together.
Meaning
Horse.
The everyday character; plain, common, immediately legible.
Other characters for “horse”
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