五
Symbols Spirit
five elements
行
ㄨˇ ㄒㄧㄥˊ wǔ xíng
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.
The five phases - wood, fire, earth, metal, water - that Chinese thought uses to explain how things generate and check one another.
Before you commit
Choose with care五行 is a technical term from Chinese cosmology and medicine, not a poetic one. It reads roughly the way the periodic table reads in English - accurate and unromantic.
At small sizesFour strokes and six, among the simplest pairs you can ink. Both hold their shape at any size and on curved skin.
Cultural noteTwo cycles are common knowledge: 相生, each phase producing the next, and 相剋, each checking another. Fortune tellers still use them to read a birth chart.
Meaning
The five phases: wood, fire, earth, metal, water.
The correct name. 行 here means phase or movement, not element or substance.
Other characters for “five elements”
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