水
Symbols Animals
buffalo
牛
ㄕㄨㄟˇ ㄋㄧㄡˊ shuǐ niú
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.
English buffalo covers two different animals, and Chinese names them separately: the Asian water buffalo and the American bison.
Before you commit
Choose with careDecide which animal you mean before anything else. 水牛 is the grey Asian buffalo in a paddy field; 野牛 is the shaggy North American bison. They are not interchangeable.
At small sizes4 plus 4 strokes. Unusually simple for a two-character word, and it stays legible even quite small.
Cultural noteIn Taiwan the water buffalo is a strong symbol of rural patience and of the island's farming past. It reads as endurance rather than as wild power.
Meaning
Water buffalo, the animal of the rice paddy.
The buffalo of Asia, and a deeply familiar rural image in Taiwan.
Other characters for “buffalo”
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