Those lightly incised guide lines, left in the stone when the work was finished, are an oddly intimate detail, a glimpse of the craftsman pausing to mark out his letters before committing them to false-relief, a technique in which the decoration appears raised by cutting away the background rather than sculpting the motif itself. The slab is fossiliferous limestone, the dark fine-grained material quarried in the Kilkenny region and threaded through with the compressed remains of ancient marine creatures, and its decorated face bears a seven-armed segmental cross-head with fleur-de-lis terminals, rising from a shaft, a stepped base, and flanking streamers, with a small knob of interlace ornament at the top.

The inscriptions, cut in Latin blackletter, name members of two prominent Kilkenny merchant families across what appears to have been at least two phases of use. The marginal text commemorates Robert fitz Shee, burgess of the town of Kilkenny, who died in July 1499, and his wife Katherine Sherlock, whose date of death is now illegible. The internal inscription records Thomas Shee, also described as a burgess, who died on the 31st of March 1514, along with Isabella Butler, who died in October of a year partially preserved, and a third entry, for someone named Michael, that breaks off unfinished. A mensa, the flat stone surface that formed the top of an altar-tomb, the slab was likely originally part of an early sixteenth-century funerary monument before being repurposed as a ledger, a flat grave-marker set into a floor. It was laid into the floor of what was known as the monuments room in the north transept during the 1960s, lifted from there in 2015, and is now displayed upright or accessible in the south transept, where the inscriptions and the stonemason's ghost-lines can be read at close range.