Among the site's surviving stonework is a broken stone cross that forms part of the south-western side of the Monks' Graveyard, the small enclosure where the island's hermit community buried its dead. The cross's head is missing or damaged, and what survives measures just 0.83 metres high, 0.34 metres wide, and 0.09 metres thick, modest dimensions that give it an air of quiet austerity rather than monumental ambition.

The cross features short arms with rounded angles, a form consistent with early Irish stone crosses, which were often simple in profile before the elaborate high-cross tradition developed on the mainland. As recorded by archaeologists A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, the piece is numbered among the many carved and inscribed stones that have survived on Skellig Michael despite centuries of Atlantic weather. The island's monastery is generally associated with a community of monks who inhabited the rock from around the sixth or seventh century, living in corbelled dry-stone beehive cells, or clocháns, arranged on a narrow terrace hundreds of feet above sea level. That a carved stone cross, however fragmentary, survives in this context is a reminder that the community maintained the ordinary rhythms of Christian monastic life, including burial of its members, in one of the most inhospitable settings in early medieval Europe.