故
Symbols Memory
absent friend
人
ㄍㄨˋ ㄖㄣˊ gù rén
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 friend who is not here - away, out of touch, or dead. One Chinese word deliberately covers all three.
Before you commit
Choose with care故人 leans toward the dead. In any memorial context a reader takes it that way first, so choose it only if that is what you mean.
At small sizesEleven strokes in total, and the second character is only two. The pair looks lopsided unless 人 is sized generously.
Cultural note故人 runs through classical parting poetry - the friend seen off at the river and never met again. It carries that farewell tone with it.
Meaning
An old friend; also someone who has died.
The same two characters do both jobs, and readers feel the double edge.
Other characters for “absent friend”
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