雀
Symbols Animals
sparrow
ㄑㄩㄝˋ què
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.
A small, ordinary bird in Chinese, used as the measure of everything modest and unambitious.
Before you commit
Choose with care雀 is small and humble by definition. In 燕雀安知鴻鵠之志 it is the bird that cannot understand great ambition. That belittling sense is hard to shake off.
At small sizes11 strokes with a stack of horizontals on the right. Clean and reliable small, better than most bird characters.
Cultural noteIn Cantonese-speaking areas 麻雀 is the ordinary word for mahjong. In Hong Kong a sparrow tattoo may well be read as a gambling reference.
Meaning
Sparrow; more broadly any small bird.
The single character; compact and immediately understood.
Other characters for “sparrow”
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