菊
Symbols Nature
chrysanthemum
ㄐㄩˊ jú
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 autumn flower of endurance and long life, and also the flower Chinese and Japanese families take to graves.
Before you commit
Choose with care菊花 is well established slang for the anus in Mandarin — a euphemism rather than a crude word, but a joke all the same. It began on Taiwanese BBS in the late 1990s and spread from there. Note that Wiktionary files that slang sense under the single character 菊 as well, in both its Chinese and its Japanese entries, so the one-character form is not the safe harbour it looks like. Standard dictionaries — the Ministry of Education's and 漢典 both — record only the plant.
At small sizesTwelve strokes, tightly packed under the grass radical. Workable but not generous small.
Cultural noteWhite and yellow chrysanthemums are both funeral flowers in Chinese and Japanese custom. The chrysanthemum crest has been the mark of the Japanese imperial house by long convention, though the ordinance that made it official was abolished in 1947 and no current law defines it — it is custom, not a national emblem.
Meaning
Chrysanthemum.
Direct and unmistakable, one of the Four Gentlemen.
Other characters for “chrysanthemum”
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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