福
Symbols Spirit
blessing of merit
報
ㄈㄨˊ ㄅㄠˋ fú bào
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.
Good fortune understood as earned - the return on good deeds rather than a gift. Chinese has a precise everyday word for it.
Before you commit
Choose with care福報 is a ledger word. It implies you earned this, and it gets used the other way round as a warning - 折福, spending down your blessings by behaving badly.
At small sizesFourteen strokes then twelve, both fairly dense. The three stacked boxes on the right of 福 close up first.
Cultural noteOlder relatives say 惜福, cherish your blessings, meaning do not waste what merit bought you. The whole idea assumes an account that can run dry.
Where the sense comes fromThe character is literally tree shade, and that is where the protection sense comes from: what an ancestor casts over descendants is the same word as what a tree casts over the ground. Taiwan reads 蔭 yìn for both senses. The mainland splits them — 树荫 (tree shade) is yīn, while 庇荫 and 荫庇, the protection meant here, are yìn on both sides.
Meaning
The blessing that comes back to you from merit you accumulated.
Explicitly causal: fortune you paid for in advance with good deeds.
Other characters for “blessing of merit”
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