長
Symbols Spirit
immortality
生
ㄔㄤˊ ㄕㄥ cháng shēng
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.
Never dying. Chinese separates a deathless body, an undying name and eternal life in the Christian sense, and uses a different word for each.
Before you commit
Choose with careNo single character means immortality. 長生 is bodily deathlessness and sounds Daoist and faintly alchemical; 不朽 is about being remembered, which is what most people actually mean.
Pairs well with長生不老, to live long and never age, is the set phrase. Readers finish it in their heads the moment they see 長生.
At small sizesEight strokes then five, plain and open. Easy to ink small, and the pair stays legible on curved skin.
Meaning
Everlasting life; to live without end.
The Daoist goal - the one the elixir and the alchemists were for.
Other characters for “immortality”
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