File:McCandlish, red, 1256x1256 square.png

English: The McCandlish Red tartan (Scottish Register of Tartans no. STR 5216; Scottish Tartans Authority no. ITI 3324).

McCandlish is a Lowlands family tartan, loosely based on Black Watch (in turn derived from Old Campbell), with an influence from Gordon. The yellow stripe in the tartan represents the "bright line" events – Jacobite risings, Highland and Lowland clearances, plantation of Ulster, British colonialism, potato famines in Ireland and in Scotland – that resulted in the Gaelic diaspora. Yellow was selected, as well as black and red (in the original/base version of the tartan), from the colours of the earliest known McCandlish blazon (coat of arms): "Or, a galley her oars in action, and sails furled sable, flags gules; on a chief of the last, three mullets argent." The blue represents the sea, as the vast majority of McCandlishes, McCandlesses and related are among the diaspora, especially in North America and Australia & New Zealand, and it is again a reference to that 13th-century blazon, which features a ship. The increasing width of the black "tram track" stripes from 4 to 8 to 24 threads (or 2-4-12, in smaller weavings) represents the continuing worldwide growth of the name from a once very small family.

The McCandlish suite of tartans was designed in 1992 by Stanton Ward Foster McCandlish in Albuquerque, New Mexico, US, with advice from J. Charles "Scotty" Thompson FSTS, author of So You're Going to Wear the Kilt.