鄉
Symbols Emotions
longing for home
愁
ㄒㄧㄤ ㄔㄡˊ xiāng chóu
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.
The pull back toward the place you came from — homesickness with a wistful, literary edge.
Before you commit
Choose with careNo single character carries this. 鄉 by itself just means one's native district or rural areas, and 愁 alone is generic melancholy.
At small sizes鄉愁 runs 12 and 13 strokes. Both are open enough to survive reduction, but the pair needs a tall column.
Cultural note鄉愁 is bookish in a good way — it is the title of a much-taught poem, so readers meet it as literature rather than sentiment.
Meaning
Nostalgia for one's home region.
The exact word, and a familiar one from modern poetry.
Other characters for “longing for home”
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