How to express "Stone Master" as a compliment

Question

I dabble in Shodo and I am designing a calligraphy to give as a gif to a martial arts master.

He is French, and his name is Pierre (Pierre, just like all other derivatives of Latin "Petrus", like Peter, Pietro, Pedro, Piotr... all come from a root word meaning Stone... in fact in French Pierre translates to Peter as a personal name, and to "stone" when used as a word for a thing).

So I wanted to write a Kanji combination to express the concept of Stone Master, and I come up with:

    石
    主

My question: what would the effect on someone who is fluent in Japanese?

I understand this is not a common word, but I just want to be sure that it is not demeaning/funny/inappropriate (I expect him to hang it in his dojo where it will be also seen by some Japanese person in the future).

I also appreciate any suggestion about something that is - in your opinion - better/more appropriate/more "honorific" for the same concept, as long as, if possible, it is written in Kanji only, which works better for me when doing Shodo.

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Further remarks:

According to this (but take in account that I had to use Google Translator because I do not know Chinese at all) "石主" in Chinese it is some sort of mythical figure.

Final (?) note

Thanks everybody, in the end I went for a different idea altogether

Answer 1

The kanji 主 means "master (of a slave)", "master (of a pet)", "owner", "governor", etc., but it does not mean he is an expert of something. If you simply want to say "grand master (of martial art)", let's use 師範 (shihan), which is a simple and nice term for that concept. It can be used also as an honorific name suffix, just like "sensei".

So we get 石師範, which sounds like "(Grand) Master Stone" or "Stone-sensei" to me. This is still confusing and actually a little funny because almost no Japanese people can associate "Pierre" with "stone", but there is nothing we can do for that. If you are willing to explain that part, it should pass as a meaningful wordplay. Someone who is fluent both in Japanese and French should notice the intention.

石戦士 does sound like "Stone Fighter", and I imagine something like "a golem with a sword" :)

Answer 2

Depending on the particular martial art, 師傅 or 師父 could be appropriate. These are the kanji / hanzi spellings of the common title shifu used to refer to one's martial arts instructor in Chinese (related Wikipedia page). The second spelling has overtones of fatherliness as well, if that's a sense you'd like to add (or avoid).