手
Symbols Relationships
brotherly bond
足
ㄕㄡˇ ㄗㄨˊ shǒu zú
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 tie between brothers, or between men who treat each other as brothers. Chinese has a standard image for it: hands and feet, parts of one body.
Before you commit
Choose with care手足 is a metaphor, not the word for brother. A reader sees hands and feet first and siblings second - which is the point, but know that is what is on your arm.
JapaneseBoth characters exist in Japanese, but the pair is not the standard Japanese word for siblings. It will read as Chinese there.
At small sizesFour strokes plus seven, both open. One of the safer two-character combinations for small or curved placement.
Meaning
Hands and feet; siblings, and the bond between them.
The everyday Chinese metaphor for brothers - cut one off and the body is maimed.
Other characters for “brotherly bond”
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.
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