舞
Symbols Beauty
dance
ㄨˇ wǔ
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.
Moving to music. Chinese separates the art of dance from the ordinary act of dancing.
Before you commit
Choose with care舞 covers waving and brandishing as well as dancing, and in 舞弊 it even means to cheat. Alone it is still read as dance by most people.
JapaneseShared with Japanese, read bu or mai, and used for classical Japanese dance. It reads comfortably in either language.
At small sizesFourteen strokes, four short verticals crossing stacked horizontals. That grid fills in fast - not a good small tattoo.
Meaning
Dance; to dance, and to wave or brandish something.
The art itself, and also the character in 揮舞, to flourish something in the air.
Other characters for “dance”
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