鴉
Symbols Animals
raven
ㄧㄚ yā
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.
Chinese does not separate raven from crow, and the bird is read as black, ominous, and occasionally as devoted to its parents.
Before you commit
Choose with careThere is no Chinese word that means raven as distinct from crow. Whatever you write here, a Chinese reader pictures a crow.
At small sizes15 strokes, mostly on the right. Reasonably legible small, but the bird element still needs a few millimetres to breathe.
Cultural noteThe crow is an unlucky bird whose call brings bad news, and 烏鴉嘴 means someone who jinxes things by speaking. The Western romance of the raven does not transfer.
Meaning
Crow or raven. The single character for the bird.
Specific to the bird, unlike 烏, which also just means black.
Other characters for “raven”
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