Cut into its face is a cross with expanded terminals, a form where the arms flare outward at their ends, measuring roughly 63 centimetres tall and 44 centimetres wide. That alone would be worth noting, but beside it, incised into the same stone, is something stranger: a crowned figure with arms raised, whose entire body is itself formed in the shape of a smaller, similar cross. It is an image that sits at the intersection of the human and the symbolic, a person made out of the very sign they appear to venerate.

The stone sits just 25 metres south-east of a prehistoric cairn, a burial mound of heaped stones that predates the Christian imagery on the rock by a considerable stretch of time. The proximity of the two is unlikely to be accidental, though what it means precisely is harder to say. The inscribed cross and figure were first formally recorded by W. St. J. Joyce in 1912, though the carvings themselves are undated. The cairn nearby is a protected National Monument, number 464, held in the guardianship of the Minister, and the site was later documented by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy as part of an ongoing survey record.

Tibradden Mountain is part of the Dublin Mountains and is accessible via forest trails that are reasonably well walked by locals. The inscribed stone lies on the north-western slopes, close to the cairn, so finding one effectively leads you to the other. The carvings are shallow and incised directly into granite, which means that low-angle light, the kind that arrives in the early morning or late afternoon, will reveal the lines far more clearly than overhead midday sun. The crowned figure in particular is easy to miss if the light is flat, so timing the visit accordingly makes a real difference to what you are able to see.