It is easy to overlook. At just 45 centimetres tall and 29 centimetres wide, it does not demand attention the way a round tower or an oratory might. But the carving on its west face repays a closer look: an encircled cross, the kind known from early Irish Christian tradition in which the arms of the cross are contained within a ring, except that here the lower shaft breaks free of the circle and continues downward beyond it. That small departure from a common formula gives the slab a quiet distinctiveness.

The slab was recorded in a 1996 survey of the Iveragh Peninsula by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, who described it as being of regular rectangular form, only seven centimetres thick, and positioned close to the graveyard's north-eastern boundary. Cross-slabs of this kind, simple upright stones incised with a cross rather than fully sculpted, were widely used in early Irish monasticism as grave markers or devotional objects. The encircled cross in particular has a long history in insular Christian art, appearing in various forms across early medieval Ireland and Scotland. The extension of the shaft below the circle is a detail that appears in other examples from the period, though its precise significance is not agreed upon. Skellig Michael, known in Irish as Sceilg Mhichíl, was inhabited by a community of monks from perhaps the sixth or seventh century, and the graveyard in which this slab stands would have served that community across several centuries of occupation.