竹 · zhú
竹 · zhú
Character · Stillness
What it means
Bamboo — hollow inside, straight, and the plant that bends and returns rather than breaking.
竹：中空而直，那根压弯了还能弹回来而不是折断的植物。
Where the character comes from
The second of the Four Gentlemen, and the one the literati leaned on hardest: bamboo is straight because it is hollow, it yields because it is jointed, and it is green all winter when nothing else is.
A pictograph of the two drooping leaf-clusters on a stalk; the character is the plant before it is any moral about it.
- Official historyShuowen Jiezi竹部
- Literary noteFour Gentlemen
How it gets misread
梅兰竹菊 read as 梅蓝竹巨 → Same script throughout
The set is a fixed four; writing any of them in a different script from the others breaks it.
Before you ink
Show the joints — the nodes are the feature. A bamboo drawn as plain vertical strokes has lost the reason it bends and returns.
Bamboo is also a very common filler motif in tattoo shops, which is why the segment and joint density has to be right for it to read as a deliberate design.