錦
Symbols Animals
koi
鯉
ㄐㄧㄣˇ ㄌㄧˇ jǐn lǐ
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 ornamental koi was bred in Japan, in Niigata, from the early nineteenth century; Japanese calls it nishikigoi, and Chinese calls it 錦鯉, brocade carp. There is no single Chinese character that means it.
Before you commit
Choose with careKoi is a Japanese fish name. Written in Chinese as 錦鯉 it still reads as a carp variety, not as the cultural idea English speakers attach to koi.
JapaneseJapanese writes koi as 鯉 alone. If the Japanese sense is what you want, the single character is the accurate choice and 錦鯉 is not.
Cultural noteSince 2018, 錦鯉 has also meant a person on a lucky streak. It was named one of that year's ten internet words by China's National Language Resources Monitoring and Research Centre, which traces it to an Alipay giveaway that October searching for a "China koi". It has not faded: Taiwanese news used 錦鯉體質, koi constitution, for someone born lucky at the end of 2024, without stopping to explain it. Expect younger readers to reach for that sense before the fish.
Meaning
Brocade carp. The Chinese name for ornamental koi.
The only phrase a Chinese reader takes as koi rather than plain carp.
Other characters for “koi”
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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