母
Symbols Relationships
mother
ㄇㄨˇ mǔ
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 woman who raised you. Chinese has a formal written character and a warm spoken one, and they are not interchangeable.
Before you commit
Choose with care母 is formal, and in compounds it also marks the female of an animal. Alone it reads more like a label than an endearment; 媽 is the affectionate one.
Cultural note慈母手中線, the thread in a loving mother's hand, opens a poem every Chinese child learns. That is why 慈 reads as maternal.
At small sizesFive strokes with two dots inside a curved frame. The dots can close up small, but it holds together better than most.
Meaning
Mother; maternal. Also female, of animals.
The written, formal word — mother as a category more than as a person.
Other characters for “mother”
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.
Read more
This character is one of the ten in a longer piece on what a character carries beyond its dictionary meaning.
Related concepts