Look closely, though, and the worn surface resolves into something quite specific: a woman's face, her head resting on a pillow, wearing a pill-box headdress, her neck unusually elongated and broadening towards the shoulders before the carving simply ends. The slab is broken on at least two sides, possibly three, so what survives is a remnant of something larger, a funerary effigy reduced by centuries of damage to this one haunting detail of a head and neck carved in high relief.

Effigial tombs, in which the deceased is depicted lying in repose, were a prestige form of medieval commemoration, typically reserved for those of some social or ecclesiastical standing. Despite the heavy spalling and wear that have softened her features almost to abstraction, enough remains to make out a high forehead, oval-shaped eyes, and a pointed chin. The style places her in good company: the scholar John Hunt, writing in 1974, identified comparable effigies in the nearby St. John the Baptist's graveyard and dated them to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. This fragment at St. Dominick's shares enough stylistic common ground with those pieces to suggest a similar date, placing it at a moment when the Dominican friaries of Tipperary were active centres of patronage and craft.

The abbey itself provides the frame for understanding the fragment. Dominican houses, founded on the mendicant principle of poverty and preaching, nonetheless attracted the burials and commemorations of local noble families throughout the medieval period, and the presence of an effigy, even a partial one, speaks to that dynamic. That she is a woman makes the piece particularly notable; female effigies from this era are less common than their male counterparts, and the care taken with the headdress and pillow, even in a work now so badly worn, suggests this was once a finely observed piece of funerary sculpture.