根
Symbols Relationships
roots
ㄍㄣ gēn
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.
Where you come from - family, place, line. Chinese uses the same plant image as English, and a reader takes it just as readily.
Before you commit
Choose with care根 is concrete. A reader sees a plant root first and ancestry second, and in slang it also means a stick or stalk - keep the context clear.
Pairs well with根源, root and source, or 尋根 for the search. Either makes the ancestral sense explicit and reads naturally.
At small sizesTen strokes, left and right evenly weighted. One of the more forgiving characters for small or curved placement.
Meaning
Root; the base of a thing, its origin.
Works for plants and for people exactly as the English word does.
Other characters for “roots”
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