罪
Symbols Spirit
sin
ㄗㄨㄟˋ zuì
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.
Wrongdoing before God. The character borrowed for it means crime and legal guilt first, and that meaning colours every other use.
Before you commit
Choose with care罪 means criminal guilt before it means anything religious, and 罪人 is both sinner and convict. Worn alone it reads as a confession of a crime, not of a spiritual condition.
JapaneseJapanese uses the same character, read tsumi, with the same double sense of crime and sin.
At small sizesThirteen strokes under a flat net-shaped top. The two halves beneath that top crowd together at small size.
Meaning
Crime, guilt, offence; sin in Christian Chinese.
A courtroom word. Christian Chinese borrowed it, but the legal sense stayed.
Other characters for “sin”
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