熟
Symbols Life
maturity of years
ㄕㄨˊ shú
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.
Being fully formed by experience rather than by age alone. Chinese borrows the word for ripe and cooked.
Before you commit
Choose with care熟 reads as cooked or ripe before it reads as mature — 熟了 said of food is the everyday use. Pair it as 成熟 for the human sense.
Pairs well with成熟 for personal maturity, 純熟 for a skill fully mastered. Either one removes the kitchen reading.
At small sizesFifteen strokes, with a fire radical of four dots at the base. Those dots fill in and become a smudge when inked small.
Meaning
Ripe, cooked, done; familiar through long practice.
Maturity as ripeness, the same word for fruit, for food and for people.
Other characters for “maturity of years”
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