6'7" x 9'9" Persian Tabriz Rug | Mahi Herati Fish Design | Wool and Silk, Perfect Condition

This is the Mahi, the design that made Tabriz famous, woven here at a scale that drops neatly into a standard 7 x 10 room. The 6'7" x 9'9" field is covered edge to edge in the tiny diamond fish lattice, with a lobed ivory medallion floating at the center and two pendant cartouches reaching toward the ends. The pile is wool with silk used sparingly to outline the medallion and the border tracery, so the drawing catches light where the weaver wanted it to, and the cotton foundation keeps the whole piece flat and true. Condition is perfect, with full pile and clean, original fringe on both ends. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

Mahi means fish, and the name comes from the motif repeated thousands of times across this field: a small lozenge flanked by two curved leaves that read like fish circling a pond, each one no wider than a thumbnail. Set as an all over Herati lattice, it gives the rug its quiet, textile-like surface. Over that sits a scalloped ivory medallion with a stepped, cusped outline, a salmon and apricot heart and a small green cartouche at the exact center, echoed by matching ivory spandrels in the 4 corners and two arrow-shaped pendants above and below. The main border is ivory, drawn with alternating round rosettes and palmettes linked by slate-gray vinework, and it is framed by 5 narrow guard stripes carrying zigzag ribbons, star-flowers and reciprocal dentils. The corners resolve cleanly, which is the mark of a cartoon followed properly rather than improvised at the end.

Colors in Detail

The ground is a deep chocolate brown that darkens to near black between the motifs, and against it every small color reads clearly: brick red, moss and olive green, rust and apricot, slate blue, soft rose and pinpoints of chalk white that give the lattice its sparkle. The medallion moves through cream to blush pink to burnt orange, with a green and mahogany center, so the eye is pulled straight to it. Ivory and beige carry the spandrels, the pendants and the wide border, where the rosettes come up in garnet, terracotta and gold with green leaf tips on a gray-blue vine. The guard stripes add turquoise and coral in tiny doses. Overall the palette is warm and earthy rather than bright, which makes it easy to live with next to wood floors, brown or camel leather, brass and cream plaster walls.

Tabriz Origin and Weave

Tabriz sits in the far northwest of Persia and has been a weaving capital longer than almost anywhere else in the country, with workshops that still measure fineness by the Raj system, the number of knots counted across a gereh of warp. The Mahi is Tabriz's own calling card, and it is an unforgiving pattern: at any loose weave the little fish leaves blur into mush, so a workshop only attempts it when the knot count can hold the drawing. Here it holds, as the close-up photographs show, with each lozenge and leaf still legible and the medallion outline crisp where silk has been used for the contour lines. The cotton warp and weft give the rug a firm handle and a flat, even back, and the wool is the dense, springy stock this region is known for, the kind that stands up to decades of use in a dining room or a busy living room. Sold as part of our Persian Tabriz rugs group, this one is a recent weave in perfect condition, which means you are buying the full life of the rug rather than the end of it.