鐵
Symbols Nature
iron
ㄊㄧㄝˇ tiě
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.
Iron the metal, and the hardness people mean when they call someone iron-willed.
Before you commit
Choose with care鐵 does carry the sense of unyielding, but it also reads as blunt and inflexible. For inner firmness alone, 剛 or 毅 is closer.
Pairs well with鐵心 reads as a heart set hard on something, and 鋼鐵 is the ordinary word for steel.
At small sizesTwenty-one strokes in the traditional form. This is a poor small tattoo and needs real size to stay legible.
Meaning
Iron; also unyielding, ironclad, certain.
Used of hard evidence and hard people as well as of the metal.
Other characters for “iron”
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