It occupies the easternmost of four flat-headed niches, separated by fluted pillars, and sets the tone for everything that follows across the panel. The remaining three niches carry the Arma Christi, the instruments of the Passion, including a seamless garment, Peter's sword, a ladder, pincers with nails, a scourging pillar with twisted ropes, and what may be a lantern or thirty pieces of silver. The westernmost niche holds a Crucifixion scene. Much of this imagery is now worn, but the overall programme is unmistakeable: a meditation on mortality and redemption arranged across a single stone face.

The tomb was commissioned by James Neales, identified in the Latin inscription running in Black Letter script around the edge of the flat top slab, known as the mensa, as burgess and sovereign of Callan. A sovereign was the chief civic officer of an Irish corporate town, roughly equivalent to a mayor, which places Neales among the more prominent citizens of what was then a walled medieval borough. The inscription, transcribed by Carrigan in 1905, records that Neales had the monument made on 10 January 1624, intended for his parents, himself, and his descendants. His first wife, Johanna Brinne, had already died on 2 February 1596; her death date is carved in relief beside the central cross on the mensa. The entry for his second wife, Aegidia Tobin, was left incomplete, the day and month never filled in. Neales himself died on 17 March 1640, and that date appears on the other side of the cross. The mensa itself carries a large IHS monogram, a Christogram derived from the Greek letters of Jesus's name, with interlace woven through the letterforms and a cross pattée, a cross with arms that flare at the ends, cutting through the bar of the H. The west side panel repeats the IHS in a different style, with capitals bearing expanding terminals and interlace scrolls sprouting from the uprights. The east side panel carries a quartered heraldic shield in raised relief, though one quarter is no longer legible.