暗
Symbols Nature
darkness
ㄢˋ àn
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.
Darkness, and the hidden or unlit side of things.
Before you commit
Choose with care暗 mostly means hidden or covert in daily use, as in a secret signal or a covert deal. Darkness as an aesthetic is not the first reading.
At small sizesThirteen strokes with a sun radical on the left. It closes up at small sizes.
Cultural note冥 heads the funeral vocabulary — 冥紙, 冥婚, 冥府 — and standing alone it reads as the underworld. It is not only that, though: it is also the 冥 of 冥想, meditation, and of 冥冥之中. The compound decides, but a single 冥 does not.
Meaning
Dark, dim; also hidden, covert.
Covers both the absence of light and things done out of sight.
Other characters for “darkness”
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