愛
Symbols Emotions
love
ㄞˋ ài
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 whole range from romance to devotion to simply liking a person, a thing or an activity a great deal — one character covers all of it.
Before you commit
Choose with care愛 is used for people, food, hobbies and brands equally — it is not a solemn word in daily Chinese. 情 or 戀 says something more specific about the kind of love.
JapaneseThe same traditional glyph is standard in Japanese (ai), so the character alone does not signal Chinese rather than Japanese to a viewer.
At small sizesThirteen strokes with a crowded middle where the claw, cover and heart meet. Below roughly three centimetres the centre fills in solid.
Meaning
Love, in every sense: romantic, familial, and mere fondness.
The universal word, and the one nearly everyone will recognise at a glance.
Other characters for “love”
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