Sheep's head and anchor
The last of four short articles on mirror symmetric tiles. This is another of Ortwin Schenker's ideas. The sheep's head and anchor are from Bob Nungester's treasure trove of computational shapes. The anchor is composed of a stopcock and two bowties (below, far right): Arnaud Chéritat was the first to find a periodic tiling (below left). I noticed it could be broken down into a smaller component comprised of two sheep's heads and one anchor : The example below shows all possible legitimate configurations when combining two of these motifs. It can be thought of as a single polygon, as it does not use reflections: Many periodic tilings are possible; two examples below: And another with a tree motif: Here are two attempts of a hexagon without any gaps. The motifs are still intact although less obvious: Some familiar shapes disguised as voids (highlighted in white): These drawings were created using the latest stable version of Arnaud Ché...