陰
Symbols Spirit
yin-yang
陽
ㄧㄣ ㄧㄤˊ yīn yáng
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 two halves that make a whole - shade and sun, yielding and firm. Chinese always writes it as a pair; there is no single character for it.
Before you commit
Choose with care陰 is not a neutral word on its own. It carries shade, cold, the underworld, and in some compounds the genitals. Wear the pair or neither - a lone 陰 reads badly.
JapaneseJapanese reads 陰陽 as onmyo and links it to court diviners, onmyoji. Chinese readers have no such association.
At small sizesEleven and twelve strokes, both with the mound radical, so the pair looks balanced. Keep the gap between them open or they read as one crowded block.
Meaning
Yin and yang; the paired opposites that between them generate everything.
The plain, correct name for the idea, understood by every Chinese reader.
Other characters for “yin-yang”
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