陰
Symbols Spirit
yin
ㄧㄣ yīn
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 receptive, shaded half of the yin-yang pair. Not the bad half - just the dark, still, inward one.
Before you commit
Choose with care陰 leans negative in modern Chinese - 陰險 is sinister and 陰暗 is gloomy. Without 陽 beside it the shadow reading dominates.
JapaneseThe same glyph in Japanese, read in or kage, best known there in onmyo, the yin-yang arts. Legible but archaic-feeling.
At small sizesEleven strokes with the mound radical on the left. It reduces reasonably, though the right side crowds.
Meaning
Yin; shade, the shaded side of a hill; dark, hidden, negative.
The character itself, and its everyday meanings all point to shadow.
Other characters for “yin”
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