彼
Symbols Memory
beyond
岸
ㄅㄧˇ ㄢˋ bǐ àn
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.
Whatever lies past this life. Chinese borrows its best word for this from Buddhism.
Before you commit
Choose with care彼岸 is Buddhist vocabulary. It means the far shore reached by crossing out of suffering, which is close to beyond but is not an afterlife.
JapaneseIn Japan 彼岸 also names the equinox weeks when families visit graves. A Japanese reader may think of the festival before the metaphor.
At small sizesSixteen strokes over two fairly open characters. Workable at moderate size if the two are evenly weighted.
Meaning
The far shore; the other side, in the Buddhist sense of release.
The standard image for what lies past this life of suffering.
Other characters for “beyond”
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