貓
Symbols Animals
cat
ㄇㄠ māo
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.
A plain modern character for the animal, with a quiet pun on old age that painters have used for centuries.
Before you commit
Choose with care貓 is a modern, ordinary character with no poetic history behind it. Cats arrived in Chinese art late compared with tigers or cranes, so it carries less weight than you might expect.
At small sizes16 strokes with a narrow left radical. The right-hand element is the part that crowds; keep it above roughly 3cm.
Cultural note貓 sounds like 耄 and 蝶 sounds like 耋; together 耄耋 means being in one's eighties and nineties. A painting of a cat among butterflies is therefore a wish for a very long life.
Meaning
Cat. The single character.
Direct and universally read as the animal, with no second meaning.
Other characters for “cat”
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