鼠
Symbols Animals
mouse
ㄕㄨˇ shǔ
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.
Chinese uses a single character for mice and rats alike, so the small friendly animal cannot be specified.
Before you commit
Choose with careYou cannot say mouse and rule out rat in Chinese. Whatever you write here, a reader may picture a rat, with all the associations that carries.
At small sizes13 strokes with a dense cluster at the base. Those short strokes are the first to fill in; give it room.
Cultural noteIn the zodiac the rat comes first because it rode on the ox and jumped off at the finish. The animal is admired for cunning rather than for charm.
Meaning
Mouse or rat. One character for both.
The standard written form, and the zodiac animal.
Other characters for “mouse”
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