MacTavish Clan 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 BKBKRB.
Part of the MacTavish tartan — the named design grouping this sett with its other cloths.
Sourced from house-of-tartan. It is a 6 stripe tartan.
Original link http://www.house-of-tartan.scotland.net/house/TartanViewjs.asp?colr=Def&tnam=230
Provenance
Earliest known date: pre 2003 D.C. Stewart writes, " This tartan has recently (1950) come into use as being that appropriate to the Thomsons; Thomson is the anglicised form of the name MacTavish. It is not recorded in any of the early illustrated books. Many MacTavishes wear the Campbell of Argyll." Stewart may not have considered Johnston's publication in 1906 as 'early' and this may have been the source for the sett he recorded in the 'Setts of the Scottish Tartans' in 1950. Some versions show black in place of the mid blue stripe in this illustration. There is also the personal tartan of Lord Thomson of Fleet and a sett recorded in the 'Baronage of Angus and Mearns'.
3 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
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
- pre 2003 (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
Register references
External register numbers recorded for this tartan.
- Scottish Register of Tartans: 4116
- Scottish Tartans World Register: 230
Thread count
DB/8 R60 K12 DB26 K26 DB/6
One full sett is 262 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| DB | #082077 #082077 | oklch(30.0% 0.149 265.1) |
| K | #000000 #000000 | oklch(0.0% 0.000 0.0) |
| R | #D60020 #D60020 | oklch(55.2% 0.224 25.5) |
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/s6/db4r30k6db13k13db3~x2/