羚
Symbols Animals
antelope
ㄌㄧㄥˊ líng
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 antelope in Chinese is a horned relative of the sheep, best known for a strange image about leaving no trace.
Before you commit
Choose with care羚 alone is slightly bare and most readers expect 羊 after it. It is not wrong, just clipped, in the way antelop- would be.
At small sizes11 strokes, sheep radical on the left. Balanced and stable small; better behaved than most animal characters.
Cultural note羚羊掛角, the antelope that sleeps hanging by its horns so its feet leave no tracks, comes from Chan Buddhist texts and became the standard image for poetry with no trace of effort in it.
Meaning
Antelope. The single character.
Normally seen inside 羚羊, but understood alone by most readers.
Other characters for “antelope”
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