Aqueous zinc metal batteries suffer from anode dendrite growth and side reaction issues, hindering long-life cycling. This study proposes a one-step annealing strategy to successfully transform zinc foil into a single-crystal-plane negative electrode with a strong (002) crystal plane orientation. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) shows that after annealing, the zinc metal not only exhibits large-sized grains, but also uniform hexagonal zinc deposition on the zinc negative electrode after cycling. X-ray diffraction (XRD) results indicate that no diffraction peaks of basic zinc sulfate appear in Zn(002) after cycling; linear sweep voltammetry (LSV) and Tafel test results show that the (002) crystal plane can effectively inhibit the hydrogen evolution side reaction, and cyclic voltammetry (CV) test results demonstrate that Zn(002) has the smallest nucleation overpotential. Benefiting from the above advantages, the assembled zinc symmetric battery exhibits excellent cycling stability: the zinc symmetric battery shows an ultra-long cycling stability of 1600 h at a current density of 5 mA cm−2 and a capacity of 1 mAh cm−2, can stably cycle for 350 h at a high current density of 20 mA cm−2, and can still stably cycle for more than 130 h even under the condition of 60% high depth of discharge (DOD); the full battery assembled with the Zn(002) zinc negative electrode still maintains a high capacity retention rate of 85% after 2000 cycles at a current density of 2 A g−1, fully demonstrating the long-life stability and application feasibility of this negative electrode material in practical scenarios. This study provides a new strategy for long-life aqueous zinc metal batteries.