功
Symbols Protection
kung fu
夫
ㄍㄨㄥ ˙ㄈㄨ gōng fu
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.
In English it means Chinese martial arts. In Chinese it means skill earned by putting in the hours, and it applies to cooking as much as to fighting.
Before you commit
Choose with care功夫 does not mean kung fu to a Chinese reader the way it does in English. Saying someone's tea-making has 功夫 is completely normal - it means they have put the work in.
At small sizesTwo light characters, five strokes and four. Among the cleanest phrases you can pick for small or curved work.
Cultural noteThe martial reading spread worldwide through Hong Kong cinema. Chinese speakers know that sense too, but it is not the one that comes first in ordinary speech.
Meaning
Skill built through sustained effort; also time and effort itself.
The martial sense is real but secondary - the core meaning is earned mastery.
Other characters for “kung fu”
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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