狠
Symbols Protection
ruthless
ㄏㄣˇ hěn
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.
Doing what it takes, without pity. In Chinese this is not a compliment, though there is one common phrase where it means being hard on yourself.
Before you commit
Choose with care狠 is not admiring in Chinese the way ruthless can be in English business talk. It shares a dog radical and a sound with words for cruelty, and reads as vicious.
At small sizesNine strokes in a narrow left-right split. It works small, though the dog radical on the left is easily mistaken for a person radical.
Cultural note狠 also appears in 心狠手辣, cruel of heart and vicious of hand - a stock condemnation. Worn alone, the character invites that association.
Meaning
Ruthless, fierce, hard-hearted; also determined to the point of cruelty.
The character in 狠心, to harden your heart and do the painful thing.
Other characters for “ruthless”
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