龜
Symbols Animals
tortoise
ㄍㄨㄟ guī
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.
Chinese does not separate tortoise from turtle; the same longevity character serves both, with a modifier if the land animal matters.
Before you commit
Choose with care龜 in speech carries the cuckold insult through the word 烏龜. Written alone it is read as longevity, but be aware the other meaning exists.
At small sizes16 dense strokes. Needs generous size and clean skin; below about 3cm the shell hatching fills in, and it is one of the first characters to lose legibility as ink spreads.
Cultural noteTortoise shells were the surface for the oldest surviving Chinese writing. The longevity association is genuinely ancient, not tourist invention.
Meaning
Tortoise or turtle. The single traditional character.
The standard written form and the classic symbol of a long life.
Other characters for “tortoise”
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