festival

節

ㄐㄧㄝˊ jié

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

A day set apart on the calendar. The Chinese character for it also means a joint, a segment and moral integrity.

Before you commit

Choose with care節 is unusually overloaded. It means a bamboo joint, a section of anything, thrift as in 節約, and moral integrity as in 氣節. Alone on skin it is genuinely ambiguous.

JapaneseJapanese uses the simplified 節 as well and reads it setsu or fushi, with the same range of joint and season senses.

At small sizesThirteen strokes under the bamboo radical. The two bamboo leaves on top merge into a bar when inked small.

Meaning

A festival or holiday; also a joint, a segment, and integrity.

The character on every festival name from new year to mid-autumn.

Other characters for “festival”

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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