Inkoya

Symbols Animals

dove

鴿

ㄍㄜ gē

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

Layout

Chinese uses one character for dove and pigeon; the peace symbolism comes from the modifier, not the bird.

Before you commit

Choose with care鴿 alone is just as likely to be read as pigeon, a common city bird, as dove. The peaceful, white, symbolic bird needs 白鴿 or 和平鴿 to come across.

At small sizes17 strokes, bird radical on the right. Needs moderate size; the right side crowds quickly.

Cultural noteIn modern slang 放鴿子, releasing a pigeon, means standing someone up. Younger readers may catch that sense before the peace one.

Meaning

Dove or pigeon. The single character for both.

Compact and correct, though it does not distinguish the two birds.

Other characters for “dove”

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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