思
Symbols Mind
thought
ㄙ sī
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 activity of thinking, and the thought it produces. Chinese has three common characters for it and they are not interchangeable.
Before you commit
Choose with care思 leans toward longing. To 思 someone is to miss them, so as a standalone tattoo it reads more wistful than intellectual.
JapaneseRead shi or omou in Japanese, to think, with the same warmth. Fully legible there.
At small sizesNine strokes, field above heart. Cleanly stacked, and it holds together well at small size.
Meaning
To think; reflective thought, often about someone absent.
Thinking with a heart underneath it - the sense includes missing someone.
Other characters for “thought”
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.
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