玄
Symbols Spirit
mystery
ㄒㄩㄢˊ xuán
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.
What cannot be got to the bottom of. Chinese has a specific character for the dark profundity Daoism means, and it is not the same as a secret.
Before you commit
Choose with care玄 has a slangy modern life. 很玄 means dodgy or hard to credit, and 玄學 covers metaphysics, feng shui and fortune telling together, usually dismissively.
At small sizesFive strokes, small and light. It scales down perfectly, but it can look slight alone - it wants either real size or company.
Cultural noteThe first chapter of the Daodejing ends on 玄之又玄, dark and dark again, the gate of all wonders. Educated readers hear that line behind the character.
Meaning
Dark, deep, profound; mysterious in the Daoist sense.
The word the Daodejing uses for what language cannot reach.
Other characters for “mystery”
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