恥
Symbols Emotions
shame
ㄔˇ chǐ
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.
Losing face — the exposed feeling of having fallen short in front of other people.
Before you commit
Choose with care恥 is heavy — dishonour, humiliation, national disgrace. Worn alone it is a hard thing to explain and rarely reads the way English shame does.
At small sizes10 strokes, wide and split evenly. Legible small, though the ear radical can blur on fine linework.
Cultural note知恥 — knowing shame — is a Confucian virtue, so 恥 is not purely negative to a Chinese reader; it can imply moral awareness.
Meaning
Disgrace; shame as dishonour.
Public and serious, closer to humiliation than embarrassment.
Other characters for “shame”
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