德
Symbols Spirit
virtue of spirit
ㄉㄜˊ dé
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.
Goodness as an inner force rather than a rule obeyed. Chinese treats virtue as something a person accumulates and others can feel.
Before you commit
Choose with care德 is Confucian and Daoist moral force, not a warm word for being nice. In modern shorthand it also stands for Germany - 德國 - and readers do register that.
JapaneseRead toku in Japanese with the same meaning, so the glyph reads comfortably in both languages.
At small sizesFifteen strokes, with a stack of small parts over a heart on the right. Those parts merge first when it is inked small.
Meaning
Virtue; moral force; the character a person has built up.
The 德 of the Daodejing - power that comes from being good, not from strength.
Other characters for “virtue of spirit”
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