生
Symbols Life
life
ㄕㄥ shēng
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 alive. Chinese splits this between the fact of living, the lifespan you were allotted, and the activity of living day to day.
Before you commit
Choose with care生 carries a strong secondary sense of raw and unripe, as in raw fish or a stranger. Alone on skin it reads more like a fragment than a statement.
JapaneseShared with Japanese, where 生 is famously one of the most multi-read characters in the language. It will not look specifically Chinese.
At small sizesFive strokes, wide open. Excellent small-size behaviour and forgiving on curves.
Meaning
Life; to be born, to grow, to produce; also raw or unfamiliar.
The broadest life character, present in hundreds of common words.
Other characters for “life”
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.
Read more
This character is one of the ten in a longer piece on what a character carries beyond its dictionary meaning.
Related concepts