柳
Symbols Nature
willow
ㄌㄧㄡˇ liǔ
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 tree of spring riversides and of saying goodbye at the city gate.
Before you commit
Choose with care柳 is also a surname and a frequent name element, so alone it can read as a person's name rather than a tree.
At small sizesNine strokes, open on both sides of the wood radical. Comfortable small.
Cultural noteWillow sprigs were broken off and given at farewells, because 柳 sounds like 留, to stay. The tree means parting and the wish that someone would not go.
Meaning
Willow; also a common surname.
The plain name, and a character with centuries of parting poems behind it.
Other characters for “willow”
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