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A pickaxe crossed with a shovel, marking a miner.
Also known as: Miner's tools, Crossed pick and shovel, Pickaxe on a grave
A pick crossed with a shovel, often with a safety lamp. Concentrated in coalfield burial grounds, where a district's monuments carry it in numbers — and that clustering is itself the strongest evidence that the reading is occupational.
A pickaxe and shovel carved crossed on a monument, frequently with a miner's safety lamp, marking a coal or metal miner.
Contexts: History
Densely clustered in coalfield burial grounds, and that clustering is the strongest available support for reading the motif as occupational: a district where a third of the stones carry mining tools is not a district where masons happened to like the pattern.
Coalfield districts of Britain and North America
Frequently accompanies inscriptions recording death in a pit accident, and in disaster years a burial ground may carry a group of such stones sharing a date.
A pickaxe with a curved double-ended head crossed over a shovel with a broad flat blade, handles downward.
Both are trade motifs following the same conventions of occupational carving.
The safety lamp commonly accompanies the pick and shovel on miners' monuments.