'Survivor' — as in the news report after a plane crash.

What a Japanese person actually thinks
Clinical and journalistic. Where English 'survivor' carries pride and identity, Japanese 生存者 is a body count category. The emotional content simply isn't there.

Meaning

Literally: life + exist + person
Actually: A survivor of a disaster or accident. It's a headline word: 生存者は3名 ('three survivors').

Scores

Naturalness●●●●●

Correct word in a specifically journalistic register.

Coolness●●●●●

The 者 suffix turns it into a category label rather than a statement about you.

Watch out

highThis is disaster-reporting vocabulary. It does not carry the 'I came through something and it made me who I am' meaning at all.

Get this instead

生き抜く ikinuku
to survive it through to the end

The verb, with 抜く carrying the sense of pushing all the way through. This has the grit the noun lacks.
不屈 fukutsu
unyielding; unbroken

Two characters that say what surviving made you, rather than filing you under a category.

On skin

生存者

Orientation: vertical

N/A — change the words.