戰
Symbols Protection
war
ㄓㄢˋ zhàn
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.
Organised armed conflict. Chinese says it with the same character as battle, and the classical phrase for it names two bronze weapons.
Before you commit
Choose with care戰 alone is closer to battle or fight than to war as a whole. For war as a state of affairs, 戰爭 is what a Chinese reader expects to see.
At small sizesSixteen dense strokes. This is a large-format character; below a few centimetres it loses its internal structure.
Cultural noteChinese writing about war is overwhelmingly against it. A war character worn as a badge of pride reads oddly; there is no glory tradition attached to the word.
Meaning
War, battle, fighting; to wage war.
The single character behind every modern word for warfare.
Other characters for “war”
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