哀
Symbols Memory
mourning
ㄞ āi
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 grief after a death and the observances around it. Chinese keeps the feeling and the ritual in different characters.
Before you commit
Choose with care哀 is sorrow of any kind, including pity felt for a stranger. It says grief, not specifically mourning for your own dead.
At small sizesNine strokes, a mouth enclosed by a clothing shape. Reads well small if the enclosed part is kept from filling in.
Cultural noteWhite, not black, is the colour of Chinese mourning, and for a parent the mourning period was traditionally counted in years.
Meaning
Grief, sorrow; to grieve; to pity.
The feeling itself, with no ritual attached to it.
Other characters for “mourning”
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