機
Symbols Life
opportunity
ㄐㄧ jī
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.
A moment when something becomes possible. Chinese frames it as a mechanism turning - the hinge point of a situation.
Before you commit
Choose with care機 alone reads as machine to most modern readers - 手機 is a phone, 飛機 a plane. The opportunity sense needs a second character to surface.
Pairs well with機會 for plain opportunity, 時機 for the right moment. Either removes an ambiguity that is genuinely misleading here.
At small sizesSixteen strokes, very dense on the right. Poor small-size behaviour - the right half turns solid quickly.
Meaning
Opportunity, crucial moment; also machine and mechanism.
The pivot in a situation - the same character as in crisis and in aircraft.
Other characters for “opportunity”
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