rebirth

甦

ㄙㄨ sū

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

Layout

Coming back to life, or living a second life after something ended. In Chinese this is a heavy, dramatic word rather than a casual one.

Before you commit

Choose with care甦 is not a rare or literary character — 復甦 is everyday economic vocabulary and 心肺復甦術 is the official Taiwanese name for CPR. What is true is that it almost never stands alone: it lives inside 復甦, 甦醒 and 心肺復甦術, and 甦醒 and 蘇醒 are both accepted spellings. On its own it reads as a word with its second half missing. For the everyday sense of starting life over, 重生 is the honest choice.

JapaneseJapanese uses this glyph in 甦る (yomigaeru), to be revived. It is legible there, but reads as half of a verb rather than a standing word.

At small sizesAround twelve strokes in a tight left-right split. The upper right can clog when inked small or on curved skin - allow generous size.

Meaning

To revive; to come back to life after lying still or dormant.

Used of a person regaining consciousness or a field greening again in spring.

Other characters for “rebirth”

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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