A tartan's colour order is nearly its name

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Reduce a tartan to almost nothing — six colours, and the order they run in, with every thread count thrown away — and you would expect to be left with something far too coarse to tell one tartan from another. Hundreds of designs ought to collapse together. They don't. In the Scottish Register of Tartans, that stripped-down colour sequence is very nearly a fingerprint.

What we kept, and what we threw away

We took the register-of-tartans dataset on its own — 7,393 setts — so that every match is two genuinely distinct tartans, not the same tartan re-listed across sources. Each stripe was quantised to the nearest of six base colours (blue, black, red, green, yellow, white), and the thread counts were discarded entirely. What survives is the Pattern: the bare order of coloured stripes across the half-sett, folded so a reflective sett and its mirror count as one. So B24 K8 G24 R4 and B6 K2 G6 R1 both reduce to the same four-colour Pattern, BKGR.

Sett on Tartan Dictionary

A tartan's colour order is nearly its name

What we kept, and what we threw away