蝶
Symbols Animals
butterfly
ㄉㄧㄝˊ dié
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 butterfly in Chinese carries love and transformation, and quietly puns on living to a great age.
Before you commit
Choose with care蝶 alone is slightly clipped in modern Chinese, the way lepidopteran reads oddly in English. 蝴蝶 is what a reader expects unless you want a literary tone.
At small sizes15 strokes with the insect radical on the left. Legible small if the right-hand element is not compressed.
Cultural noteTwo threads meet here. Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly and could not say which was real; and the Butterfly Lovers story ends with a doomed couple transformed into a pair.
Meaning
Butterfly. The single character, slightly literary on its own.
Compact and elegant; the form used in poetry and set phrases.
Other characters for “butterfly”
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