Colonial New England slate headstone lettercutting is the Puritan funerary craft of carving heavy imported English slate into grave markers — deeply V-incised classical roman capitals and winged death's-head motifs cut by hand into dark blue-gray stone.

The referent is the stone face itself: weathered, lichen-flecked, never a sheet of paper. It reads as dark slate-blue-gray, with cut letter-faces catching a thin highlight along their bevels, the whole sitting in a sober, deeply-shadowed mortuary register.