龜
Symbols Animals
turtle
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.
One character covers turtles and tortoises; it means long life to a Chinese reader, but the spoken word is also a serious insult.
Before you commit
Choose with careIn writing 龜 means longevity. Spoken aloud in the word 王八 or 烏龜 it means cuckold and is genuinely offensive. Most readers separate the two, but not all do.
JapaneseSame character in Japanese, read kame, also meaning long life. Reads Japanese as readily as Chinese.
At small sizes16 strokes packed into a narrow frame. The shell hatching fills in fast; below about 3cm it becomes a black blob.
Meaning
Turtle or tortoise. The traditional form, dense and pictorial.
The classical emblem of longevity and the divinatory shell.
Other characters for “turtle”
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