卜
Symbols Spirit
oracle
ㄅㄨˇ bǔ
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.
Divination, and what it says. Chinese has separate characters for the practice, for the figure it produces, and for a god speaking.
Before you commit
Choose with care卜 is two strokes and looks unfinished. Most readers take it for a component of a larger character, or for the surname Bu, rather than for a word.
At small sizesTwo strokes. It cannot fail small, but it is so plain that scale, placement or ink weight has to carry the design instead.
Cultural noteThe earliest surviving Chinese writing is divination records scratched into ox bone and turtle shell. Divination here is not folklore - it is where the script came from.
Meaning
To divine; divination.
Two strokes, and the oldest word for it - but it almost never stands alone.
Other characters for “oracle”
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