labor

勞

ㄌㄠˊ láo

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

Layout

Physical work and the effort it costs. The Chinese character carries the tiredness as well as the work.

Before you commit

Choose with care勞 leans toward exhaustion. It is the character in 疲勞, fatigue, and 辛勞, toil. It says work that wore you out, which may be exactly right or entirely wrong.

JapaneseJapanese uses the simplified form 労. The traditional 勞, with its two fire elements over the roof, reads as Chinese or as deliberately classical.

At small sizesTwelve strokes with a fussy top of two crossed elements over a cover. The top merges into a bar when inked small.

Meaning

Labour, toil; hard work, and the weariness that comes with it.

The character for work you feel in your body afterwards.

Other characters for “labor”

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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