習
Symbols Relationships
custom
俗
ㄒㄧˊ ㄙㄨˊ xí sú
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.
What people here do because people here have always done it. Chinese keeps this separate from law and from personal habit.
Before you commit
Choose with care俗 alone mostly reads as vulgar or tacky - 俗氣 means crass. As a tattoo it would be read as the insult, not as custom.
Pairs well with民俗, folk custom, is the warmest of the pair-words and the one museums and festivals use.
At small sizes習俗 runs about twenty strokes. 俗 alone is nine and clean, but the meaning problem outweighs the stroke saving.
Meaning
Custom; the established practice of a place or community.
The neutral standard word, and it avoids the trap the single character sets.
Other characters for “custom”
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