犛
Symbols Animals
yak
牛
ㄇㄠˊ ㄋㄧㄡˊ máo niú
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 yak is a Tibetan animal at the edge of Chinese vocabulary, written with a character most readers rarely meet.
Before you commit
Choose with care犛 is a genuinely obscure character. Written alone, plenty of educated Chinese readers will not identify it, and some will guess at the pronunciation.
At small sizes15 plus 4 strokes. The pairing is unbalanced, with a dense first character beside a very light second; watch the visual weight.
Cultural noteThe yak belongs to the Tibetan plateau, not to Han Chinese tradition. The word exists in Chinese but carries no old symbolism the way the ox or horse does.
Meaning
Yak. The standard word, an uncommon character plus cattle.
The complete and correct form; the 牛 is what makes it readable.
Other characters for “yak”
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