That detail, almost incidental, turns out to be quietly distinctive. The cross does not sit within the slab so much as fill it entirely, as though the carver intended the stone itself to become the cross rather than merely carry one.

The pillar measures roughly 80 centimetres in height, 23 centimetres wide, and averages about 8 centimetres in thickness, placing it among the smaller class of early medieval cross-slabs found throughout Ireland. These are upright stones bearing incised or grooved crosses, often associated with the earliest phases of monastic Christianity on the island. The cross here is described as almost equal-armed, a form sometimes called a Greek cross to distinguish it from the Latin cross with its elongated lower arm, and it is rendered in a multi-line grooved technique, meaning the design was cut as parallel channels rather than a single incised line. It occupies the upper half of the east face of the stone. The graveyard in which it sits is itself associated with an early monastic foundation on the island, and Inishbofin has a long ecclesiastical history, with early Christian settlement preceding the more well-known later medieval activity there. The slab was recorded and described by Higgins in 1987.