土
Symbols Nature
soil
ㄊㄨˇ tǔ
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.
Earth you can dig; one of the five phases, and modern slang for hopelessly unfashionable.
Before you commit
Choose with careIn current Mandarin slang 土 means corny, unfashionable, provincial. Younger readers will get that meaning first, which makes a lone 土 a risky tattoo.
At small sizesThree strokes, so it cannot blur, but it differs from 士, scholar, only in which horizontal is longer. Careless work turns one into the other.
Cultural note土 is one of the five phases, holding the centre and the colour yellow. In that system it means stability and what everything else rests on.
Meaning
Earth, soil, ground; also local, native, and in slang tacky.
Three strokes for one of the oldest and most basic characters there is.
Other characters for “soil”
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