昔
Symbols Life
past
ㄒㄧˊ xí · mainland reads xī
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.
What has already happened. Chinese has a flat everyday word for it and a literary one that carries nostalgia with it.
Before you commit
Choose with care昔 never appears alone in speech; readers know it from 昔日, days of old. On skin it reads as deliberately literary, which may be the point.
Cultural noteIn speech 過去了 can mean a person has died as well as that time has passed, so the word carries a faint echo of loss.
At small sizesEight strokes, wide and open with a sun beneath. Scales down cleanly and sits well on a curve.
Meaning
Former times, days gone by; of old.
Bookish and warm — the past as remembered rather than as dated.
Other characters for “past”
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