Black Thistle
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 BKGKGKRKR.
Sourced from register-of-tartans. It is a 9 stripe tartan.
Original link https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/tartanDetails.aspx?ref=5815
2 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
- pre 2007 — Black Thistle (register-of-tartans, record)
Threadcount taken from a kilt shown to Dr Phil Smith at the Grandfather Mountain Games, USA in 2007. Purchased from Australia, the coarse weave and light texture suggest that it was not of Scottish origin. - pre 2007 — Black Thistle (Artefact) (tartans-authority, record)
A kilt shown to Dr Phil Smith in 2007 at Grandfather Mountain Games. The lady said she had purchased it over Ebay from someone in Australia. The coarse weave and light texture led Phil to think that it was not of Scottish origin.
Dataset — provenance for this record, inherited from the source manifest
- source
- Scottish Register of Tartans
- data captured from
- https://github.com/thetartan/tartan-database/blob/master/data/register-of-tartans/data.csv
- data date
- pre 2007 (this record)
- licence
- Crown copyright
Capture chain — the hands this data passed through, oldest first; each capture carries its own licence
- Scottish Register of Tartans · Crown copyright
the living register — still published by National Records of Scotland - 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: 5815
- Scottish Tartans Authority (ITI): 7867
Thread count
B/20 K12 G84 K4 G2 K4 R2 K48 R/4
One full sett is 336 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| B | #466CC8 #466CC8 | oklch(55.1% 0.149 265.0) |
| G | #008B2A #008B2A | oklch(55.4% 0.170 145.9) |
| 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/s9/b10k6g42k2g1k2r1k24r2~x2/