力
Symbols Virtues
strength
ㄌㄧˋ lì
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.
Physical force, or the inner steadiness that keeps a person going. Chinese uses different characters for the two.
Before you commit
Choose with care力 is raw physical force and turns up in words like electric power. For inner strength or resilience, 毅 or 韌 reads far better to a native eye.
JapaneseSame glyph in Japanese, read chikara. On its own it will often be taken as Japanese first.
At small sizesTwo strokes. Scales down cleanly and survives curved placements better than almost any other character.
Meaning
Power, force, physical strength.
The everyday character for force, from muscle to horsepower.
Other characters for “strength”
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