Lifts.

In very early China diviners heated tortoise shell over flame till it cracked and then read meanings from the design of the cracks.  It's a Chinese idea that writing started from copying these cracks.  Every kind of writing relates to natural materials.  The current form of Chinese characters with their little hooks and right angles came about when the Han Chinese shifted from incising signs with a stylus on shaved bamboo staves to writing with a rabbit-hair brush dipped in a pine soot ink on absorbent mulberry-fiber paper.  The Chinese character forms are entirely a function of the way a brush tip turns when it lifts off the page.  Lifting a brush, a burin, a pen, or a stylus is like releasing a bite or lifting a claw.

Gary Snyder, from Practice of the Wild