self

己

ㄐㄧˇ jǐ

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

You, as distinct from everyone else. Chinese has several characters for it, differing in how much weight they put on the boundary.

Before you commit

Choose with care己 is a bound word. It appears inside 自己 and 知己 but is not written by itself, so alone it will look incomplete to a reader.

Pairs well with克己 is self-mastery and 知己 is someone who truly knows you. Both are well-loved phrases built on this character.

At small sizesThree strokes, all wide and open. It scales down as far as anything in Chinese, but it is easily confused with 已 and 巳.

Meaning

Oneself; one's own person.

The self in 自己 and in 克己, self-mastery - it names the self plainly.

Other characters for “self”

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