孝
Symbols Emotions
respect for elders
ㄒㄧㄠˋ xiào
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.
Filial respect — the duty owed to parents and forebears, and the central virtue of Chinese family life.
Before you commit
Choose with care孝 is specific — it is about your own parents and ancestors, not respect for older people in general. Worn alone it reads as a family declaration.
At small sizes7 strokes, open and stable. One of the cleanest characters here for small or curved placement.
Cultural note孝 also appears in mourning practice — 帶孝 is wearing mourning for a parent — so some readers associate the lone character with a recent death.
Meaning
Filial piety; devotion to one's parents.
One character for a whole moral system; nothing in English is as loaded.
Other characters for “respect for elders”
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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