蛛
Symbols Animals
spider
ㄓㄨ zhū
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.
Spider is normally a two-character word in Chinese; the single character exists but reads bookish.
Before you commit
Choose with care蛛 alone is understood but looks clipped, the way arachn- would in English. If you want it read as plain and confident, 蜘蛛 is the safer form.
At small sizes12 strokes, insect radical plus a clean phonetic. One of the easier insect characters to keep legible small.
Cultural noteSpiders are not sinister in Chinese the way they often are in English. A spider dropping down is traditionally a small omen of good news arriving.
Meaning
Spider. The single character, mostly seen inside compounds.
Terse and literary alone, but a reader does understand it as spider.
Other characters for “spider”
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