security of home

安

ㄢ ān

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

Layout

The settled safety of a household where nothing is going wrong. This is the most common thing Chinese families wish each other.

Before you commit

Choose with care安 is extremely common and reads as plain and modest rather than striking. That is its strength; nobody will find it pretentious, and nobody will find it dramatic either.

Cultural note平安, peace and safety, is what families wish each other at new year and before a journey. It outranks wealth and luck in what people actually say to each other.

At small sizesSix strokes — the 宀 radical over a compact 女. One of the best-behaved characters at small size and on curved skin.

Meaning

Peace, safety, calm; secure and untroubled.

宀 over 女. Traditionally explained as a settled household, which is a reading of the shape rather than an account of where the character came from.

Other characters for “security of home”

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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