The panel measures roughly 96 centimetres across and 57 centimetres high, and it carries no name, no date, and no inscription of any kind. What it does carry is an extraordinarily dense programme of imagery: the Arma Christi, or instruments of the Passion, carved in relief. An urn on a pillar, pincers, nails, a hammer, a cock perched on the scourging pillar with ropes coiled around it, a cup, a lance, a ladder, the seamless robe, and a cross bearing the crown of thorns. Each object refers to a moment in the Passion narrative, and together they would have served as an aid to devotion for anyone who paused before the original tomb.

The panel once formed part of the medieval church of St Nicholas of Myra, a dedication to the fourth-century bishop of Myra in Asia Minor who became one of the most widely venerated saints in the medieval world. The church appears to have stood until around 1813, when it was demolished to make way for a Church of Ireland building on the same site. The tomb panel was not discarded but incorporated into the new church's western boundary wall, which is where it remains. The identities of whoever commissioned the tomb and whoever was buried within it have been lost entirely; without an inscription, even a rough date is difficult to assign on documentary grounds alone.