Colour tattoo on an upper arm of red and green tartan with a circular clan crest, a bird motif and a motto banner in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tartan with clan crest on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A red and green tartan pattern covers the upper arm, with a circular clan crest sitting over it. The crest has a ribbon banner bearing a short motto and a bird motif inside a grey-shaded ring, with a small sprig at the base. The tartan is rendered in bold red, dark green and yellow-thread lines, while the crest uses muted greys and tans for contrast.

Traditional Upper arm Banner Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dye vats had been cold since Tuesday, and Ailsa Rennie still had the sett book open on the bench when the telegram boy came up the cobbled brae to Linton Mill. She read the wire twice before she understood it was not bad news for her, only for the cloth. The red and green sett the Dunmore men had ordered for their centenary had been lost in a lorry overturned on the Lauder road, and the buyer wanted it matched by Friday or not at all.

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She spent the afternoon at the old sample cabinet, where a brass plate showed the clan crest the sett was meant to carry. A ribbon banner curled beneath a ring, a bird spread its wings above a sprig of something that might have been heather, and the motto ran across the top in cut capitals. Hamish, who had worked the looms since before the war, came to stand behind her and said the sett could not be matched by counting threads. The yellow lines had to be woven in on purpose, every fourth pass, or the cloth would look right and sit wrong.

She stayed past the whistle of the last goods train, rewinding the warp by lamplight and shooting the weft shuttle until her shoulders ached. When the bolt came off the loom at dawn, the crest sat square in the middle of the first repeat, bird facing outward. Hamish ran his thumb along the yellow lines and grunted, which from him was praise. Ailsa folded the length so the banner showed on top and tied the parcel with string for the morning post.