The lily, rendered in relief rather than incised, gives the slab an unusual tactile quality, the kind of detail that rewards a closer look rather than a passing glance. The slab tapers from a base width of just under sixty centimetres down to roughly half that at its narrower end, and runs to nearly two metres in length, proportions typical of medieval funerary slabs intended to mark the resting place of a single individual beneath or beside it.

The stone was unearthed at the friary in 1908, according to the Reverend J. Gleeson, which means it had been buried or concealed for some period before that date. How long it had lain out of sight, and whose grave it originally marked, is not recorded. The Dominican friary at Lorrha was founded in the medieval period in a part of north Tipperary that had already accumulated centuries of ecclesiastical significance, the wider Lorrha area being associated with early monastic settlement. The choice of a St. Joseph's lily as the central motif is relatively uncommon in Irish funerary carving, where crosses, swords, and foliate patterns appear far more frequently, which makes this slab a quietly singular object in a landscape already dense with religious archaeology.