誠
Symbols Virtues
truthfulness
ㄔㄥˊ chéng
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.
Habitually telling the truth, and being the real thing rather than a copy.
Before you commit
Choose with careIf you were expecting 真, note that it means genuine or real more than truth-telling. For not lying, 誠 and 誠實 are accurate.
Japanese誠 is read makoto in Japan and is heavily used in names and on Shinsengumi imagery. Expect a Japanese reading abroad.
At small sizesThirteen strokes with stacked horizontals on the right. They merge if the ink spreads; leave space between lines.
Meaning
Sincere; speaking and then doing.
Truthfulness as a quality of the speaker, not of the facts.
Other characters for “truthfulness”
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