9'5" x 14' Persian Tabriz Rug | Mahi Herati Fish Design | Midnight Blue & Rust Wool with Silk

This is the Tabriz design that buyers ask for by name and rarely find in a true room size: a Mahi, or fish, drawing worked across a 9'5" x 14' field in midnight blue, with a single ivory medallion floating dead center and rust spandrels sweeping into all 4 corners. The pile is fine wool with silk highlights, knotted on a cotton foundation, and the silk catches light along the medallion outlines and the vine work in the corners. It is a heavy, flat-lying piece with a crisp handle, in perfect condition, and it reads as a serious room anchor rather than a decorative accent. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and construction, so the paperwork matches what you are looking at in the photographs. For rooms built around a sofa wall and a coffee table, this is squarely in the 10 x 14 Persian rug range that seats a full furniture group on the wool.

Design and Motifs

Mahi means fish, and the name comes from the pair of curved lancet leaves that flank each small rosette in the lattice, read by weavers as fish circling a pond. Here that allover Herati field runs edge to edge in tiny repeating units, thousands of them, each one drawn with the same diamond, rosette and leaf structure. The center carries a lobed ivory medallion with an 8 petal core, topped and tailed by two pendant finials, and the ivory spandrels in the 4 corners repeat the same lattice on a light ground so the eye reads negative space rather than an empty panel. The wide main border is a navy ground carrying alternating palmettes and rosettes on a scrolling vine, framed by rust guard stripes filled with boteh, small blossoms and reciprocal tendrils. The drawing stays disciplined at the corners, where the border pattern turns cleanly instead of being cut off, which is the detail that separates workshop weaving from village copies of the same design.

Midnight Blue, Rust and Ivory in Detail

The field is a deep midnight blue that shifts toward inky black in low light and opens into a soft plum cast where the pile leans away from the viewer. Against it, the Herati units are picked out in salmon, brick red, ivory and small flickers of turquoise and olive green, which is what gives the field its warm shimmer instead of a flat dark mass. The medallion combines ivory, brick red and gold with a pale sky blue outline, and the same sky blue reappears in the guard stripes as a cool break between the warm rust bands. The rust tone in the outer borders is a burnt terracotta, clearly warmer than the brick red of the field accents, and the navy main border returns to the same deep blue as the field so the whole composition closes on itself. Ivory comes from the corner spandrels and the cotton fringe at both ends. In practice the rug sits beautifully with walnut and cherry furniture, brass, and cool grey or greige walls, where the rust does the warming and the blue keeps the room from going busy.

Tabriz Weaving and Quality

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the country's most organized weaving center for centuries, the place where design, dyeing and knotting were run as separate trades inside a workshop rather than done at home on a village loom. Tabriz weavers use the hook, or qollab, which lets them run a very tight, even beat, and they measure fineness in Raj, the count of knots per gereh across the width. Mahi is the design that most tests that system, because the lattice only holds together when the knot count is high enough to draw each fish leaf cleanly at a small scale. On this piece the back is tight and regular, the fringe is original cotton, and the selvedges are firm, all consistent with a proper workshop production of the 2000's rather than a coarse commercial run. That construction is also why a rug of this size lies flat and takes furniture weight without distorting.