虎
Symbols Animals
tiger mother
媽
ㄏㄨˇ ㄇㄚ hǔ mā
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.
A strict, driving mother; the Chinese term is a recent import back from an American book rather than an old expression.
Before you commit
Choose with care虎媽 is journalism slang and reads modern and slightly mocking. It is not a dignified phrase in Chinese.
At small sizes媽 is thirteen strokes with a narrow 女 on the left. Fine at medium size, muddy when small.
Cultural noteThe old proverb is 嚴父慈母 — strict father, kind mother. A strict mother inverts that pairing, which is part of the phrase's bite.
Meaning
Tiger mother: a demanding, discipline-first mother.
Now the standard Chinese phrase, though it only entered the language in the 2010s.
Other characters for “tiger mother”
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