血
Symbols Relationships
bloodline
脈
ㄒㄩㄝˋ ㄇㄞˋ xuè mài
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.
Descent by blood. Chinese has two settled words for it, and they carry quite different weight.
Before you commit
Choose with care血脈 is the softer of the two words and the one to prefer. 血統 is used for breeding stock and in talk about racial purity, so it can read badly in a way the English does not.
At small sizesSix strokes plus ten. 血 is open and safe; the 脈 beside it is denser, so match their weights carefully.
Cultural note血脈相連, joined by blood, is the ordinary phrase about family. It is used of kin, and also politically about peoples, so it is not a neutral phrase everywhere.
Meaning
Bloodline; blood vessels; the line of descent through a family.
Warm and bodily, and the one used of family continuing through generations.
Other characters for “bloodline”
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