葦
Symbols Nature
reed
ㄨㄟˇ wěi
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 tall waterside plant that bends with the wind and does not break.
Before you commit
Choose with care葦 alone is bookish. Modern readers know 蘆葦, and a single 葦 may read as a fragment of it rather than as a complete word.
At small sizesThirteen strokes with a tall narrow body. Workable, but 蘆葦 together gets heavy fast.
Cultural note一葦渡江: Bodhidharma is said to have crossed the Yangtze standing on a single reed. The plant carries humility and yielding strength in Chan Buddhist imagery.
Meaning
Reed; a single stalk of reed.
The literary single character, known from the phrase about crossing a river on one reed.
Other characters for “reed”
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