歸
Symbols Emotions
belonging
ㄍㄨㄟ guī
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 sense of having somewhere you are counted as one of the group, and can return to.
Before you commit
Choose with care歸 alone reads as going back or returning home, not as the modern psychological idea of belonging. That idea needs 歸屬感.
At small sizes18 strokes in traditional form and dense on the left. Give it room.
Cultural note歸 carries a homeward pull that Chinese readers feel strongly; it appears in 落葉歸根, leaves returning to their roots at the end of a life.
Meaning
To return to where one belongs; to come home.
Chinese frames belonging as returning, not as fitting in.
Other characters for “belonging”
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