真
Symbols Spirit
truth
ㄓㄣ zhēn
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.
What is actually so. Chinese separates plain factual truth from truth as a doctrine or a final principle.
Before you commit
Choose with care真 alone reads as genuine or authentic, not as truth in the grand sense. For that meaning a Chinese reader needs to see 真理.
JapaneseIdentical glyph in Japanese, read shin or ma, with the same genuine-versus-fake sense. Nothing marks it as Chinese.
At small sizesTen strokes stacked vertically with tight horizontals in the middle. Those lines merge first when it is inked small.
Meaning
True, real, genuine; not fake.
The everyday sense - the opposite of counterfeit rather than of a lie.
Other characters for “truth”
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