蛇
Symbols Animals
snake
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: patient, precise, and in Chinese thinking a small relative of the dragon.
Before you commit
Choose with care蛇 picks up its bad reputation from set phrases rather than from the character itself: 蛇蠍心腸 is a venomous heart, 佛口蛇心 is a kind mouth over a cruel heart. The dictionary entry for 蛇 is purely zoological. Chinese also credits the snake with longevity, wisdom, wealth and medicine, and 白蛇傳 is a love story — the reading is mixed, not simply negative.
At small sizes11 strokes, split evenly left and right. It stays readable at moderate sizes.
Cultural noteIn snake years the animal is often called 小龍, the little dragon — Taiwanese museums and publishers use 小龍年 for the year itself. The dictionary marks 小龍 as a northern usage, and in Taiwan it shows up mainly around the new year rather than as an everyday way to describe someone.
Meaning
Snake, serpent.
The plain character, with the insect radical that Chinese uses for reptiles.
Other characters for “snake”
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