貓
Symbols Animals
owl
頭
鷹
ㄇㄠ ㄊㄡˊ ㄧㄥ māo tóu yīng
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 owl in Chinese tradition is an ill-omened bird, not a symbol of wisdom, and the single character is worse than the common word.
Before you commit
Choose with careThe single-character options are traps. 梟 also means ruthless and appears in 毒梟, drug lord, and in an old word for displaying a head on a pike. 鴞 is safe but unreadable to most.
At small sizesThree characters, 16 plus 16 plus 24 strokes. This is a large-format phrase; it does not compress onto a wrist.
Cultural noteThe wise owl is a Western idea. In Chinese folk belief the owl is a bird of death whose call announces a funeral. Nobody here reads it as wisdom.
Meaning
Owl, literally cat-headed hawk. The ordinary modern word.
Neutral and plain; the only version without a nasty second meaning.
Other characters for “owl”
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