救
Symbols Spirit
salvation
ㄐㄧㄡˋ jiù
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.
Being pulled out of danger, or out of suffering. Chinese uses one word for rescue and another for being ferried across to the far shore.
Before you commit
Choose with care救 is an everyday verb - 救火 fight a fire, 救命 save my life. It reads as rescue from immediate danger, with no religious colour unless something supplies it.
At small sizesEleven strokes in a clean left-right split. Reliable small; keep the diagonals on the right open and it holds on a curve.
Cultural noteThe Buddhist word is 度, as in 普度眾生, ferrying all beings across. Chinese Christian language uses 救 and 救贖. The two vocabularies barely mix.
Meaning
To rescue, to save from danger.
The plain verb, and the character Chinese Christians use for salvation.
Other characters for “salvation”
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