避
Symbols Protection
sanctuary
風
港
ㄅㄧˋ ㄈㄥ ㄍㄤˇ bì fēng gǎng
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.
A place where nothing can reach you. Chinese has no single character for this; it reaches for a metaphor, usually a harbour out of the wind.
Before you commit
Choose with careThere is no single character for sanctuary. Anything you see offered as one is a translation of the English rather than a word Chinese readers use.
At small sizesThree characters, the last one dense. This is a wide phrase; it works along a forearm or a spine, badly in a small square.
Cultural note避風港 is affectionate in ordinary speech - people call a parent, a partner or a hometown their 避風港. That warmth is the closest match to the English feeling.
Meaning
A harbour sheltered from the wind; the standard metaphor for a safe haven.
The phrase a Chinese speaker uses for the person or place they retreat to.
Other characters for “sanctuary”
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