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A pair of shears carved on a monument, marking a cloth trade or the cutting of life.
Also known as: Scissors on a grave, Cloth shears, Tailor's shears
Open shears. In cloth-working districts they mark a shearman, weaver or tailor; elsewhere they are read as the thread of life cut. It is one of the clearest cases in this vocabulary where geography decides the reading.
A pair of shears carved on a monument, marking a shearman, clothier, weaver or tailor in districts where cloth was worked.
Contexts: History
Also read as the thread of life cut, drawing on the classical image of the Fates, particularly on monuments with no cloth-trade context around them.
Geography usually settles which is meant: shears in a West Country or West Riding clothing district are almost certainly occupational, and the same carving in a farming parish is more likely allegorical.
A good illustration of why a national dictionary of gravestone symbols cannot work: the same motif reads differently forty miles apart.
A pair of shears shown open, two straight blades crossing near a pivot with looped handles behind.