午
Symbols Nature
midnight
夜
ㄨˇ ㄧㄝˋ wǔ yè
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 middle of the night; Chinese says it with two characters, not one.
Before you commit
Choose with careNo single character means midnight. 夜 is night and 午 alone is noon, so a one-character tattoo cannot carry this meaning.
At small sizesTwo characters of similar weight, about four and eight strokes. The pair balances well vertically or horizontally.
Cultural note子夜 refers to the rat hour of the old system. It reads as educated and slightly archaic, where 午夜 reads as ordinary speech.
Meaning
Midnight, the middle of the night.
The ordinary modern word, plain and unmistakable.
Other characters for “midnight”
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