親
Symbols Relationships
kinship
ㄑㄧㄣ qīn
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.
Being family, and the feeling that comes with it. Chinese names the closeness rather than the abstract category.
Before you commit
Choose with care親 leans on closeness rather than on the fact of being related. It is used of a favourite, of doing something in person, and as a verb it means to kiss.
JapaneseThe same glyph is standard in Japanese as oya, parent, and in 親しい, close or friendly. A Japanese reader will take it as parent before kin.
At small sizesSixteen strokes with a dense left half. It needs room; below a few centimetres the upper left fills in solid.
Meaning
Kin; a parent; close, intimate.
The one character that covers being related and being close at once.
Other characters for “kinship”
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