線
Symbols Beauty
line
ㄒㄧㄢˋ xiàn
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.
A drawn line, and the quality of the mark. The Chinese word for line is the word for thread, and that thread sense stays close to the surface.
Before you commit
Choose with care線 is thread first. A reader sees 電線 wire or 針線 needle and thread before an artist's line. For the drawn line, 線條 is unambiguous.
JapaneseJapanese writes the same 線 (sen) with the same meanings, so the glyph carries no signal of which language you intend.
At small sizesFifteen strokes, with the silk radical stacked tight on the left. That radical is the first thing to fill in when inked small.
Meaning
Line; also thread, wire, cable, route.
The everyday word for a line on paper and for the thread on a spool alike.
Other characters for “line”
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