殤
Symbols Memory
lost child
ㄕㄤ shāng
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 child who died before growing up. Chinese has an old, precise word for this and almost no modern one.
Before you commit
Choose with care殤 is archaic. Most readers meet it only in 國殤, a nation's fallen, so it reads as literary and grave rather than as personal.
At small sizesThirteen strokes with a narrow left radical. Give it size; the right side is dense and fills in quickly.
Cultural noteTraditionally a child who died young received lesser funeral rites and no place in the ancestral line. The word carries that silence with it.
Meaning
To die young, before adulthood; grief for one who died young.
The exact word, and it exists for no other situation.
Other characters for “lost child”
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