白
白 (bái) — white, plain, clear. Pictograph of a grain of rice / a white thing. Classical life: 清白 — spotless, innocent; 白头 — white-haired (till old age). Grammar: free morpheme — also: surname Bai; Bai ethnic group; white; in vain; free of charge; (bound form) (of facts, the truth, a situation) clear; evident (e.g. 真相大白[zhen1 xiang4 da4 bai2]); (bound form) plain; without additions (e.g. 白飯|白饭[bai2 fan4]); (bound form) to explain; to state (e.g. 辯白|辩白[bian4 bai2]); (bound form) to give a disdainful look (e.g. 白了他一眼[bai2 le5 ta1 yi1 yan3]); (bound form) vernacular (e.g. 白話|白话[bai2 hua4]); (bound form) spoken lines in opera (e.g. 念白[nian4 bai2]); (bound form) reactionary; anti-communist (e.g. 白區|白区[bai2 qu1])
Closest English meanings
white·plain·blank·free·clear
The Calligrapher — Zhào Gòu 赵构
Southern Song emperor and prolific patron of running-script calligraphy.
Song calligrapher (1107–1187), master of regular script/running script — known for 《草书洛神赋》. Song dynasty
Cultural Story
Shuowen names 白 the western color, hue of autumn and of mourning — though scribes still debate whether the glyph pictures sunlight breaking from the sun. Poets wore it thin: white clouds over the pass, white hair before the frontier, and the moon that outlasts every dynasty and guest.
Energy Reading
Metal (金)
Comparative symbology, not fortune-telling.
Common words & phrases
- 白色 white · white color · whiteness
- 白天 daytime · day · daylight
- 白云 white cloud · white clouds · white clouds
- 明白 understand · clear · plain · obvious
- 白雪 white snow · snow · snow white
- 苍白 pale · wan · pallid
Read the story behind the character
White runs the day: 白天 (daytime) shifts, 白云 (white clouds) on commute wallpapers, 苍白 (pale) faces after all-nighters, 白雪 (snow) selfies up north. You get something 白送 (free), clock in as a 白领 (white-collar worker), and cap it with 明白 (understand) — "Got it" — the text you send fifty times a day.
Why this character belongs on skin
There is a kind of white that isn't empty. It is the white of paper before the first stroke, the white of snow that has swallowed a battlefield, the white of a face gone perfectly still. In Chinese the word holds all of this at once — brightness, clarity, the bare and unadorned truth. To carve 白 into your skin is to choose the unpainted wall over the busy one, to let silence do the talking. It is the monk's robe, the blank page a writer fears and loves, the moment before dawn when the world holds its breath. We spend our lives filling things up, stacking noise on noise, terrified of the open space. But white is not absence. It is the ground from which everything else is allowed to appear. Carry it, and you carry a small, deliberate vow: to keep something clean. Some marks are meant to shout. This one whispers — and asks, quietly, that you leave room for it to stay.
Own this character
Purchase delivers the original SVG of this glyph, brushed by Zhào Gòu 赵构, ready to place on skin, paper, or screen.