8'2" x 10'2" Oriental Rug | Tabriz Mahi Herati Fish Design | 13/13 Quality Hand-Knotted Wool

This is a hand-knotted wool rug in the classic Mahi, or fish, layout, woven in India at a 13/13 quality, which works out to roughly 169 knots per square inch. At 8'2" x 10'2" it sits right in the most useful range of 8x10 Oriental rugs, large enough to carry a full seating group yet still manageable in a standard room. The pile is cut low at 3/8", which is exactly what this drawing needs: the tiny paired fish leaves and the rosettes inside the medallion stay crisp instead of blurring. If you are weighing this against a village piece, our guide to the difference between Persian and Oriental rugs is worth reading first. Condition is excellent, with full even pile and clean ends and sides, and the rug ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The whole field is covered in the Herati lattice, the pattern most dealers simply call Mahi: a diamond grid with a rosette at each intersection and 4 curved leaves set around it, the leaves that look like small fish circling the flower. That repeat runs edge to edge with no break in rhythm, which is the hardest part of this design to pull off at scale. Over the top sits a tiered center: a small dark navy diamond cartouche holding an 8 petal rosette, framed by a stepped ivory diamond, then a wider lobed brown field, then a serrated outline that steps out toward the 4 corners. The spandrels repeat the same stepped shape in deep navy so the corners read as part of the medallion rather than as filler. The main border is a cream ground carrying linked palmettes and curling arabesque vines, flanked by narrow guard stripes of small flowerheads, and the outer selvage finishes in solid red.

A Brown Field Framed in Cream and Navy

The field is brown with a warm brick cast, and because the Herati lattice is outlined in ivory and navy, the eye reads it as a soft tweed rather than a flat block of color. Inside the medallion the ground lightens to cream and sand, so the center glows against the darker field, and the navy cartouche at the very middle gives the pattern a hard anchor point. The main border swaps the balance: cream ground, with palmettes picked out in rust, terracotta, sage green, soft blue and charcoal, which is where most of the accent color in this rug lives. Guard stripes carry a muted olive and ivory. The overall effect is quieter and more formal than a red rug, which makes it easy to live with next to walnut, oak or black furniture, and it sits comfortably alongside other brown Oriental rugs in a traditional scheme.

Woven in India to Tabriz Standards

This piece was made in India, in the Osmanabad weaving tradition, where workshops reproduce the Mahi drawing on cotton warps with the same low clipped finish the design was built for. India is where most of the world's best contemporary hand-knotted weaving is now done, and we say that without hedging: the quality control on graph, dye lots and clipping in a 13/13 workshop piece like this is consistently high. The 13/13 count means 13 knots per inch in each direction, which is a genuinely fine grade for a room-size rug and is why the fish leaves hold their shape instead of turning into dots. The back photo shows the result: even rows, a tidy red selvage, no pulling at the corners and no thin spots. For a buyer who wants the look of a fine city weave in Oriental rugs without antique pricing, this is the sensible place to land.