8' x 12' Persian Tabriz Rug | Traditional Mahi Herati Fish Design | Navy, Rust & Ivory

This 8' x 12' Persian Tabriz rug is a true room size piece drawn in the Mahi, or fish, pattern that the Tabriz workshops have refined for more than a century. The field is a deep navy that reads almost black in low light, packed edge to edge with a small scale Herati lattice, and it is anchored by a stepped orange diamond medallion with an ivory rosette at its heart. The pile is hand-knotted wool at 3/8 inch on a cotton foundation, dense enough to hold the fine drawing yet heavy and flat underfoot, and the rug is in excellent condition with even pile, straight sides and full original ivory fringe at both ends. Every rug we ship travels with a certificate of authenticity confirming the origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The layout follows the classic Mahi formula. A stepped, notched diamond medallion in orange sits dead centre, filled with its own miniature Herati repeat and finished with a pale ivory rosette panel at the core. Around it runs the all-over Herati design: small diamonds framed by 4 outward curving lanceolate leaves, the fish, each pair cradling a rosette, repeated in perfect register across the whole navy ground. Ivory spandrels fill the 4 corners with the same lattice on a lighter field, so the eye reads a bright frame around a dark centre. The main border is a broad rust orange band carrying alternating turtle palmettes and pinwheel rosettes joined by a thin navy vine, and it is flanked on both sides by gold and ivory guard stripes worked with running triangles, small blossoms and a fine reciprocal edge. Nothing is left blank, which is the point of a Tabriz Mahi: the pleasure is in how tightly the repeat holds over 96 square feet.

A Closer Look at the Colors

Two colours carry the rug. The field is a deep indigo navy that darkens toward black where the pile lies away from the light, and against it the medallion, the corner reserves of the border and the main border itself glow in a warm burnt orange that shades into rust at the edges. Between them sit broad ivory and soft beige passages in the spandrels and guard stripes, which keep the contrast from going heavy. Look closely at the Herati repeat and the secondary palette opens up: teal and bottle green leaves, saffron gold rosettes, dusty rose and salmon pink blossoms, chestnut brown outlines and small touches of pale sky blue. Gentle abrash, the natural variation of hand-dyed wool, moves through the orange ground of the border and through the navy field, which is exactly what you want to see in a hand-knotted rug and the reason the surface never looks printed. The overall temperature is warm, so the rug sits comfortably with wood floors, leather, brass and cream walls.

Tabriz Weaving and Origin

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia, close to the mountains, and it is the city that turned rug weaving into a workshop industry with full scale cartoons, trained designers and master weavers working the hook knife. The Mahi pattern is one of its signatures, and it is unforgiving: any slackness in the knotting shows immediately as a wobble in the lattice. Here the repeat stays true from border to border, the medallion steps are crisp, and the selvedges and ends are cleanly finished. The cotton warp and weft give the rug a flat, stable body that will not ripple in a large room, and the tightly packed wool pile at 3/8 inch is cut low enough to keep the pattern legible while leaving plenty of wool to wear through decades of use. Collectors looking for well drawn Persian Tabriz rugs in a genuine 8 by 12 room size will recognise what this one is.