循
Symbols Life
cycle
環
ㄒㄩㄣˊ ㄏㄨㄢˊ xún huán
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.
Something returning to where it started and going round again. Chinese has no clean one-character noun for this, so the natural word is two characters.
Before you commit
Choose with careNo single character carries cycle on its own. 循環 is the honest choice, but it is a technical, slightly clinical word - readers think of plumbing and blood before they think of life cycles.
Pairs well with輪迴 if the meaning you want is spiritual. It is instantly understood, but it commits you to a Buddhist reading.
At small sizesTwenty-nine strokes across two characters. This needs real scale; small or curved placements will lose the interior detail of both.
Meaning
Cycle, circulation; a loop that repeats.
The ordinary word, used for blood circulation, recycling and repeating patterns.
Other characters for “cycle”
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