鯉
Symbols Animals
carp
ㄌㄧˇ lǐ
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 carp is the fish of ambition in Chinese: the one that leaps the dragon gate and becomes a dragon.
Before you commit
Choose with care鯉 reads as striving and examination success, not as luck arriving unasked. If you want luck rather than effort, this is the wrong fish.
At small sizes18 strokes, split fish radical and phonetic. Genuinely difficult small; the four dots and the inner grid both fill in.
Cultural noteThe dragon gate story is about a carp forcing its way upstream and transforming. It has been shorthand for passing hard exams for well over a thousand years.
Meaning
Carp. The single character for the fish.
Carries the leap-the-dragon-gate story of rising through effort.
Other characters for “carp”
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