6'6" x 9'11" Persian Tabriz Mahi Rug | Fish Herati Field | Wool & Silk, Never Used

This is a Mahi, the fish pattern that made Tabriz famous, woven in the 2000s and never put on a floor. The pile is wool with silk worked into the outlines and the ivory ground of the medallion, which is why the drawing stays crisp at this scale of detail: the tiny herati units repeat across the whole dark field without a single one losing its shape. At 6'6" x 9'11" it sits in the most useful of all 7 x 10 Persian rugs proportions, large enough to anchor a seating group but still manageable in a normal room. It ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is a true Mahi: an all-over herati lattice of diamond frames, each holding a small rosette with four curved lanceolate leaves turned outward, the leaves that gave the pattern its fish name. Over that runs a large ivory lobed medallion with a stepped floral core, flanked at top and bottom by matching crown pendants. A scalloped ivory frame ripples around the inner field and repeats again in the corner spandrels, so the eye reads three concentric layers before it reaches the border. The main border is an ivory ground carrying alternating turtle palmettes and rosettes on a thin connecting vine, set between several narrow guard stripes of running floral meander. Every element is drawn in curved line rather than angular blocks, which is the mark of city workshop cartoon work rather than village weaving.

A Black Field with Ivory, Green and Rust

The ground reads as a deep black that warms toward dark brown where the light catches the silk, and against it the herati lattice is picked out in ivory, soft gold and small points of rust and blue, so the field shimmers rather than goes flat. The medallion, the scalloped frame and the main border all sit on a clean undyed ivory that carries a faint cream tone in daylight. Inside the border, palmettes alternate between a muted sage to olive green and a warm rust to terracotta, with amber gold centers and tiny white dots along the vine. The guard stripes add thin lines of burgundy and plum that outline the whole composition and pull the dark field and the pale border together. It is a high-contrast rug, black and ivory at a distance, and a much more layered mix of green, rust and gold once you are standing on it.

Woven in Tabriz, Northwest Persia

Tabriz in northwest Persia has been a commercial weaving capital for centuries, and its workshops measure fineness by the Raj system, the number of knots counted per gereh across the width. The Mahi is the design Tabriz weavers are judged on, because the pattern is unforgiving: the herati repeat only works when the knot count is high enough to hold the small leaf curves, and any sloppiness shows immediately across an open field like this one. Here the repeat stays even from selvage to selvage, the medallion sits square in the field, and the silk outlines give the ivory drawing a raised, slightly lit quality against the wool. The foundation is cotton, tightly woven and flat, with hand-finished selvages and clean ivory fringe at both ends. Unused since it came off the loom, the pile is at full height with no wear, no repair and no fading.