The slab in the churchyard of St Michan's, on Church Street on the north side of the city, is a modest exception. It carries a relief inscription, meaning the letters stand proud of the surface rather than being cut into it, rendered in Roman lettering and commemorating a man named James Luttrell, who died in 1667. That combination of technique and legibility, after more than three and a half centuries, gives the stone a quiet distinction among the churchyard's other monuments.

St Michan's itself is one of the older ecclesiastical sites on the north bank of the Liffey, and its churchyard accumulated the remains of many Dublin families across the post-medieval centuries. The Luttrell name was well established in the wider Leinster area, and while the notes recorded by Geraldine Stout and drawn from the Memorials of the Dead (volume VI, published between 1904 and 1906) give little biographical detail about this particular James Luttrell, the date of 1667 places him firmly in the turbulent decades following the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland, a period when Catholic and Old English families alike faced considerable disruption to property and social standing. The care taken with a relief-cut Roman inscription suggests a family with some resources and an eye towards permanence, even in uncertain times.

The churchyard at St Michan's is accessible from Church Street, not far from the Four Courts. St Michan's is perhaps better known for its vaulted underground burial chambers, where unusual atmospheric conditions have preserved a number of mummified remains, and visitors often focus on those. The graveslab commemorating James Luttrell sits above ground in the churchyard itself, so it rewards a slower circuit of the exterior before or after any visit to the vaults. The relief lettering is easier to read in raking light, when the sun or even overcast daylight hits the stone at an angle and throws the raised letters into relief. Looking for it without that light, the inscription can appear almost flat.