鯨
Symbols Animals
whale
ㄐㄧㄥ jīng
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.
The whale in Chinese is a fish by its written form, and it carries scale, swallowing and one great transformation myth.
Before you commit
Choose with care鯨 appears in 蠶食鯨吞, nibbling like a silkworm and swallowing like a whale, describing territory seized piece by piece. The character carries a note of devouring.
At small sizes19 strokes, split fish radical and phonetic. Difficult small; the four dots under the fish element merge first.
Cultural noteChinese classifies whales as fish in writing, hence the fish radical. Nobody misunderstands the biology; the character simply predates it.
Meaning
Whale. The single character, built on the fish radical.
Standard and clear; also the root of 鯨吞, to swallow whole.
Other characters for “whale”
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