衛
Symbols Protection
sentinel
ㄨㄟˋ wèi
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 guard posted to watch and to warn. Chinese splits this between the post, the person and the frontier duty.
Before you commit
Choose with care衛 sounds institutional. It is the 衛 of bodyguard, of defence ministry and of 衛生, hygiene, so it carries no lone-watcher romance.
At small sizesFifteen strokes and busy through the middle. Legible, but below a couple of centimetres the interior closes up.
Cultural note戍 is the more evocative choice. Classical poetry is full of it - men posted at the frontier, watching, far from anyone they know.
Meaning
To defend, to guard; a guard or a garrison.
The formal guarding character, used for posts and for bodyguards.
Other characters for “sentinel”
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