6'6" x 8'4" Persian Tabriz Mahi Rug | Ivory Herati Fish Field, Coral Medallion | Wool & Silk, Never Used

This 6'6" x 8'4" Persian Tabriz Mahi rug was woven in the 2000's and has never been on a floor. The pile is wool with silk drawn through the outlines and highlights, knotted on a cotton foundation, and the surface still carries the crisp, slightly waxy finish of a rug that went from the loom to storage. Mahi means fish, the Tabriz nickname for the Herati pattern that covers the field here in a tight ivory lattice, and it is the design the city is best known for in this size. At 78" x 100" it sits comfortably under a queen bed, in front of a sofa, or beneath a 6 seat table without crowding the walls. Every rug we ship leaves with a certificate of authenticity recording the origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is a true all over Herati lattice, a diamond grid holding a rosette at each intersection with a pair of curved lanceolate leaves, the fish, turning away from it on either side. Nothing in the drawing is enlarged for effect: the repeat stays small and even from the fringe line all the way to the medallion, which is what separates a properly drawn Mahi from a coarse copy. At the center sits a layered pointed medallion, scalloped at the edge and stepped inward through three tones, with a slim pendant floating above and below it. The 4 corner spandrels repeat the same scalloped outline against a darker Herati ground, and a single ivory serrated line traces their inner edge. The main border runs a vine of rosettes, cypress leaf palmettes and lobed cartouches between narrow guard stripes of running flowerheads, and the corners resolve cleanly, with the vine turning the angle rather than being cut off.

A Soft Ivory, Coral and Sage Palette

The ground is a warm ivory that shifts toward cream where the silk catches the light and toward a pale sand where the wool lies the other way. The Herati grid is drawn in cocoa brown and dark navy, and inside each rosette there is a small point of blue or rust, so from standing height the field reads as a soft neutral and only breaks into color when you are close to it. The medallion is coral, a muted rose red rather than a hot red, warming to apricot and honey gold at its inner core. Green appears as a quiet sage, used for the scalloped outline that rings the medallion and the corners and again in the leaves of the border vine, and it is the color that keeps the coral from dominating. The border is a dusty rose brown, pale enough that the ivory flowerheads and the small ink dark cartouches sit clearly against it. The whole palette is gentle: this is a rug for rooms built on oatmeal, walnut, bronze and off white rather than high contrast.

Tabriz Weaving and Quality

Tabriz sits in northwest Persia and has been the country's most organized weaving city for centuries, working from paper cartoons in workshops rather than from memory. Fineness there is measured in Raj, the number of knots counted across a gereh of roughly 2.75 inches of width, and the Mahi pattern is the honest test of it: the lattice only stays legible when the knot count is high enough to draw a rosette and two curved leaves inside a small diamond. On this piece the repeat holds its shape across the full 78" width, the scalloped medallion outline stays smooth instead of stepping, and the silk-outlined details in the corners are sharp under a close look. The back, visible in the last photograph, shows a tight, even cotton weave with a straight selvage and the original hand-knotted fringe still full and unworn.