melancholy

愁

ㄔㄡˊ 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

Layout

Low, lingering sadness with no single cause — a mood rather than an event.

Before you commit

Choose with care愁 is a genuine mood word but it is unmistakably sad. On skin it reads as an announcement of sorrow, which not every wearer intends permanently.

Choose with care憂鬱 is also the clinical term for depression in Chinese, so 鬱 may be read as a diagnosis rather than a mood.

At small sizes鬱 has twenty-nine strokes in traditional form, the densest character on this page. At any tattoo size it becomes a black rectangle.

Meaning

Melancholy, care, brooding sadness.

Autumn over a heart; the standard character for a sorrow that hangs about.

Other characters for “melancholy”

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.

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