Single cluster covering approach provides a plausible mechanism for the formation and stability of octagonal and decagonal quasiperiodic structures. For dodecagonal quasiperiodic pattern such a single cluster covering scheme is still unavailable. Here we demonstrated that the ship tiling, one of the dodecagonal quasiperioidic structures, can be constructed from one single prototile with matching rules. A deflation procedure is devised by assigning proper orientations to the tiles present in the ship tiling including regular triangle, 30°-rhombus and square, and fourteen types of vertical configurations have been identified in the deflated pattern, which fulfill the closure condition under deflation and all result in a T-cluster centered at vertex. This result can facilitate the study of physical properties of dodecagonal quasicrystals.

A single cluster covering for the ship tiling of a dodecagonal quasiperiodic structure is obtained via a self-similar transformation, by which a turtlelike cluster, dubbed as a T-cluster, comprising seven squares, twenty regular triangles and two 30 •-rhombuses, is changed into twenty scaled-down T-clusters, each centering at a vertex of the original one. Remarkably, there are three types of transformations according to the distinct configuration of the 20 scaled-down T-clusters. Detailed data for the transformations are specified. The results are expected to be helpful for the study of the physical and structural properties of dodecagonal quasicrystals.