柔
Symbols Emotions
tenderness
ㄖㄡˊ róu
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.
Gentleness in how you handle someone — softness that is deliberate rather than weak.
Before you commit
Choose with care溫柔 is most often used to describe women, and applied to a man it can read as a comment on his manner. Worth knowing before it is permanent.
Choose with care柔 alone can shade into soft in the sense of weak, as in 柔弱. Paired with 韌 or 溫 it stays clearly a strength.
At small sizes柔 is nine strokes with an open lower half and reduces well, though the top hook thickens in heavy brush styles.
Meaning
Soft, gentle, yielding.
The root of every tenderness word, and a virtue rather than a shortcoming in Chinese thought.
Other characters for “tenderness”
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