蛇
Symbols Animals
serpent
ㄕㄜˊ shé
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.
The snake: a cold, patient and slightly sinister animal in Chinese, and the sixth sign of the zodiac.
Before you commit
Choose with carePeople born in snake years are politely called 小龍, little dragons, but 蛇 in ordinary speech attaches to cunning and cold-heartedness.
At small sizesThe insect radical on the left is the fine detail. Keep it open or it fills at small scale.
Cultural note畫蛇添足 — adding feet to a drawn snake — is the everyday idiom for ruining something by overdoing it.
Meaning
Snake, serpent.
The plain word for the animal; eleven strokes and universally read.
Other characters for “serpent”
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