老
Symbols Life
old age
ㄌㄠˇ lǎo
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 last stretch of a life. In Chinese the word for old is not the insult it can be in English.
Before you commit
Choose with care老 is affectionate in address — 老王 is friendly and 老師 means teacher. Worn alone, though, it simply says old and adds nothing to it.
Cultural note壽 appears on birthday banners and on funeral goods alike, so it turns up at both ends of a long life. Not unlucky, but formal.
At small sizesSix strokes with one long diagonal. Very legible small and comfortable on a curved placement.
Meaning
Old, aged; also venerable, experienced, long-standing.
The plain character, and in Chinese it carries respect as often as years.
Other characters for “old age”
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.
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