麒
Symbols Animals
qilin
麟
ㄑㄧˊ ㄌㄧㄣˊ qí lín
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 hooved chimera of Chinese myth: a gentle omen beast that appears for a wise ruler, and not the unicorn it is usually translated as.
Before you commit
Choose with careThe qilin is not a unicorn. It is an omen animal tied to wise rule and to gifted children, with none of the European horse-and-horn associations.
JapaneseRead kirin, and in Japan tied first to the beer brand and to giraffes, which share the same word.
At small sizesTwo of the densest characters in common use, around twenty strokes each. They blot below about 4 cm.
Meaning
The qilin: the auspicious hooved beast of Chinese legend.
The only spelling a reader recognises; the two halves are never split in modern use.
Other characters for “qilin”
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.
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