One that does so by carving a hammer, chisel, and anvil beside a geometric cross and a reversed tetraskelion, all without a single word of inscription, is something else again. This particular slab, now propped upright against the west wall of the lateral aisle in Athenry's Dominican church in County Galway, commemorates someone, almost certainly a smith, in the most direct visual terms imaginable, and then refuses to say who.

The slab dates to 1631, as indicated by the initials IHS and that year cut into its upper right corner, the only text it carries. It is a substantial piece of stone, tapering slightly in the coffin-shaped manner common to medieval and early modern grave markers, measuring 1.75 metres tall and just over 0.79 metres across at its widest point. The decoration is dense and carefully organised. A cross with an interlaced, lozenge-shaped head rises from a plaited stem at the centre. To the right of this, an interlaced six-pointed pattern sits alongside a triquetra, the three-cornered knotwork symbol found widely in early Christian and later Irish stonework. To the left are the smith's tools, rendered plainly and without ambiguity. In the upper left corner, a tetraskelion, a four-armed rotational figure related to the swastika form but here reversed, is enclosed within a circle. When the scholar R. A. S. Macalister recorded the slab in 1913, it was lying flat in the church porch. At some point between then and now it was raised upright and fixed to the wall where it currently stands, a change that alters how the composition reads but preserves the carving from foot traffic and weather.