Charun's appearance is unusually consistent across the Etruscan tomb paintings and engraved bronze mirrors that record him, which is part of what allows scholars to speak of him as a stable figure of Etruscan belief rather than as a locally invented monster appearing once. Blue-grey or blue-black skin, a hooked or vulture-like nose, pointed animal ears, visible tusks and, in several images, snakes wound around his forearms mark him out immediately from the human figures he stands beside; the two-handed mallet he generally carries is his most consistent single attribute, appearing in scene after scene regardless of which other details a given artist included or left out. He is most often shown positioned at the literal threshold of the tomb, or directly beside a dying or newly dead figure, a placement scholars read as deliberate: Charun's job is the moment and site of transition itself, not a journey undertaken afterward.
That threshold placement is also what most clearly separates him from the ferryman function later Greek and Roman tradition assigns to the similarly named Charon, and it is worth stating plainly that the resemblance in name has misled readers before: nothing in the Etruscan evidence shows Charun on a boat or crossing a river, and his mallet, generally interpreted as marking the finality and irrevocability of death rather than as a weapon, has no equivalent in the Greek ferryman's iconography at all. Etruscan tombs sometimes multiply him, showing more than one Charun-figure attending a single scene, or pair him with Vanth, a winged female death-demon who performs a closely related escorting role, evidence that Etruscan funerary belief imagined death's passage as attended by more than one such guardian figure rather than by a single personified Death.