The Calligrapher — Bèi Yìyuān 贝义渊

Liang calligrapher of the regular-script Xiao Dan Stele, a rare Southern Dynasties monument.

南朝梁 calligrapher (), master of regular script — known for 《始兴忠武王碑》. Liang dynasty (Southern Dynasties)

Cultural Story

截 is to cut clean across. The old manuals used it for the severed road and the intercepted message, and the character shows a weapon through a thing, the decisive pass. It is the break that leaves two neat ends, the interruption that brooks no argument.

Common words & phrases

• 截断 cut off · sever · block
• 截止 deadline · expire · close
• 拦截 intercept · block · stop
• 截然 sharply · completely · distinctly
• 截图 screenshot · capture · screen grab

Read the story behind the character

截 is the cut and the cap: 截断 the line that goes down, 截止 the deadline on the form, 拦截 the app that blocks the call. 截图 is the screen you grab and send, 截然 the difference the chart makes plain. It names the break both physical and administrative, the slice and the rule.

Why this character belongs on skin

There is a mercy in the clean cut. The blade comes down and what was dragging—a debt, a history, a love that had gone to rot—is simply no longer attached to you. 截 does not apologize; it severs. Think of the gardener pruning the pear tree in February, the shears biting through dead wood so that spring has somewhere honest to arrive. The character carries both halves of the bargain: 戈, the dagger-axe, held against whatever must be separated. The ancients used it for rivers dammed mid-flow, for a journey interrupted, for time cut into something you can hold—a 截 of silk, a moment severed from eternity and pressed into the hand. Every life eventually demands this stroke. You do not heal the wound by keeping it connected; you heal it by choosing where the line falls. Some tattoos are statements. This one is a decision, made once in skin and never unmade.