鴛
Symbols Animals
mandarin duck
鴦
ㄩㄢ ㄧㄤ yuān yāng
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 mandarin duck is the standard Chinese image of a devoted couple, and its name is two characters that only work as a pair.
Before you commit
Choose with careNever split this. A single 鴛 or 鴦 reads as half a word, and to a romantic-minded reader as a bird without its mate, which is the opposite of what you meant.
At small sizes16 strokes each. Two dense characters that must stay together; plan for a placement wide or tall enough to hold both clearly.
Cultural note鴛鴦 is the standard motif on wedding quilts and embroidery. It has also given its name to 鴛鴦 the Hong Kong drink, coffee mixed with milk tea, from the same idea of two things joined.
Meaning
Mandarin ducks. The complete word, and the emblem of a loving couple.
Instantly read as marital devotion; one of the warmest images in the language.
Other characters for “mandarin duck”
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