lion

獅

ㄕ shī

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

The lion: not a native animal, but the stone guardian at gates and the beast of the New Year dance.

Before you commit

Choose with care獅 almost never stands alone in modern Chinese. Written by itself it reads like half a word, the way lio- would in English.

At small sizes13 strokes with the dog radical left. Reasonably clear, but the right side crowds when small.

Cultural noteChinese lions are guardians and performers, not savanna predators. Readers picture the stone pair outside a gate or the lion dance, not a hunting animal.

Meaning

Lion.

The single character, though speech nearly always adds 子.

Other characters for “lion”

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