天
Symbols Animals
swan
鵝
ㄊㄧㄢ ㄜˊ tiān é
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 everyday word for swan is literally heaven-goose; the classical single character now reads as lofty ambition rather than the bird.
Before you commit
Choose with care鵠 alone is risky. Read gu it means a shooting target, and many readers will take it that way before they take it as swan. 天鵝 avoids the problem entirely.
At small sizesTwo characters, 4 plus 18 strokes, badly mismatched in density. 鵝 will darken and 天 will look thin unless the weights are adjusted by hand.
Cultural note鴻鵠之志, the ambition of the great swan, is a set phrase for aspirations too large for ordinary people to grasp. That phrase is why these characters feel noble.
Meaning
Swan, literally heavenly goose. The standard modern word.
Unambiguous, and the form used for swan lake and swan song alike.
Other characters for “swan”
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