Polaris Corporate Tartan
This is one variant — a specific cloth: this exact thread count and colourway, with its own provenance below. It is one weaving of the sett (the scale-free proportion — the same cloth at any scale or shade), whose colour order is pattern BKBKBKGGBWBGGKBKB.
Sourced from house-of-tartan. It is a 17 stripe tartan.
Original link http://www.house-of-tartan.scotland.net/house/TartanViewjs.asp?colr=Def&tnam=222
Provenance
Earliest known date: 1964 Designed for the Officers and men of the American Submarine base at the Holy Loch - making the Polaris submarine the first ship in history to have its own tartan. The idea came from Captain Walter F Schlech, Commander of the submarine squadron. The arrangement of stripes between the cornflower yellows is blue-sky-blue (Dalgliesh). It was previously recorded as green-blue-green (STS). The sindex card created by Davidson c1964 is Black-Royal Blue-Black. The sky blue version was recently confirmed as the correct one by R. E. Trygstad, LCDR USN (Retired), who has in his possession an original scarf with the sky blue colours.
Dataset — provenance for this record, inherited from the source manifest
- source
- House of Tartan
- data captured from
- https://github.com/thetartan/tartan-database/blob/master/data/house-of-tartan/data.csv
- data date
- 1964 (this record)
- licence
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Capture chain — the hands this data passed through, oldest first; each capture carries its own licence
- House of Tartan
the weaver/retailer's database — the site is now offline; the URL is kept as the ultimate source's identity - thetartan/tartan-database 2016-2017 · CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Levko Kravets's frozen compilation — the capture we vendored, and where its CC licence text came from - this dictionary captured 2026-06-10 · commit 5bf86c7566
each re-capture is a git commit to data/sources
Thread count
DB/24 K4 DB4 K4 DB4 K28 G24 Y4 DB4 LB4 DB4 Y4 G24 K28 DB28 K4 DB/4
One full sett is 372 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| DB | #2800A8 #2800A8 | oklch(34.8% 0.220 274.3) |
| DB | #202060 #202060 | oklch(28.9% 0.111 276.9) |
| G | #008B2A #008B2A | oklch(55.4% 0.170 145.9) |
| K | #000000 #000000 | oklch(0.0% 0.000 0.0) |
| LB | #B5BBDE #B5BBDE | oklch(79.9% 0.050 277.6) |
| DP | #3C3C60 #3C3C60 | oklch(37.3% 0.061 283.0) |
| Y | #8B6E00 #8B6E00 | oklch(55.1% 0.113 90.4) |
Sample pattern
Nearest tartan variants
The nearest existing variants by ΔTartan distance, with this cloth at the top so the swatches line up against it.
Neighbour map
Every grey dot is one of 13621 variants placed by the first two principal components of the ΔTartan feature space (42% of its variance). Red is this tartan; blue dots are its nearest — click one to open its page.
ID: /variants/s17/db6k1db1k1db1k7g6y1db1lb1db1y1g6k7db7k1db1x4db1204274/