師
Symbols Relationships
teacher
ㄕ shī
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 person who teaches you. The single character is old and respectful and covers craft masters as well as school teachers.
Before you commit
Choose with care師 also means a master of a trade and, in classical texts, an army division. Alone it reads as master or teacher in the abstract rather than my teacher.
At small sizesTen strokes in a narrow left-right split. Legible small, though the left element can close up if inked very fine.
Cultural note一日為師終身為父, a teacher for a day is a father for life, is the traditional line about this relationship. 師 carries that weight of obligation, not just a job title.
Meaning
Teacher, master; one whose skill or learning you follow.
The core character in every word about teaching and about mastery.
Other characters for “teacher”
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