傳
Symbols Memory
legacy
ㄔㄨㄢˊ chuán
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.
What outlasts you and passes to whoever comes next. Chinese separates what is inherited from what is carried on.
Before you commit
Choose with care傳 has two readings: chuán, to pass on or to spread — including spreading a disease — and zhuàn, a biography. A Taiwanese reader defaults to chuán; the zhuàn reading only surfaces inside titles like 《左傳》 or 自傳. The real caution is different: 傳 is a bound morpheme in modern Chinese, so alone it reads as a word with its other half missing rather than as legacy.
Pairs well with傳承 is the honest choice for a legacy handed down. 遺產 means money and property first, so it reads oddly as a personal motto.
At small sizesThirteen strokes, person radical beside a dense right half. Give it size - the right side fills in when small.
Meaning
To pass on, to hand down, to transmit.
The character of handing something to the next person in line.
Other characters for “legacy”
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