九
Symbols Animals
nine-tailed fox
尾
狐
ㄐㄧㄡˇ ㄨㄟˇ ㄏㄨˊ jiǔ wěi hú
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 nine-tailed fox: an omen beast in early texts, a seductive shapeshifter in later stories, and an insult in modern speech.
Before you commit
Choose with care狐狸精 and the nine-tailed fox both commonly mean a woman who steals another woman's partner. The myth and the insult share the same folklore.
JapaneseRead kyuubi no kitsune; in Japan the nine-tailed fox is far more of a pop-culture figure than it is in China.
At small sizesThree characters of two, seven and eight strokes. Set them vertically; in a row they read as a caption.
Meaning
Nine-tailed fox.
Three characters, but the only phrasing that names the creature; no shorter form exists.
Other characters for “nine-tailed fox”
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