禱
Symbols Spirit
prayer
ㄉㄠˇ dǎo
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.
Asking something of a god. Chinese has an old and precise character for it, used in temples long before any church arrived.
Before you commit
Choose with care禱 seldom appears alone in modern writing. By itself it looks like half of 祈禱 to most readers.
Cultural noteIn temple practice a wish made before a deity is 許願, and you are expected to come back and 還願, repay it, if it is granted.
At small sizesAround eighteen strokes, with the long 壽 element on the right. Dense and tall; not a small tattoo.
Meaning
To pray; to petition a god or an ancestor.
The formal word for prayer, in temple and in church use alike.
Other characters for “prayer”
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