師
Symbols Relationships
master
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
Same in both
Layout
Rubbing mode: white on black, as a stone rubbing. The download is unaffected.
Someone who has mastered a craft, or the one in charge. Chinese keeps those two ideas in different characters.
Before you commit
Choose with care師 means master of a skill. It says nothing about authority over people, and 主 means the opposite: an owner, not an expert. Picking the wrong one changes the claim entirely.
JapaneseShared with Japanese, read shi, with the same craft-master sense in words like 師匠. Legible there, and not distinctively Chinese.
At small sizesTen strokes, narrow and vertical. Fine on a forearm or a spine; the left element crowds if inked very small.
Meaning
Master of a skill or of learning; teacher.
Mastery earned by skill, and the character every reader links to it.
Other characters for “master”
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