In this study, an ultra-compact metamaterial absorber (MMA) has been proposed for microwave applications comprising two modified square-shaped resonators printed on a dielectric substrate and terminated by a metallic plane. The proposed MMA exhibits perfect absorption at 3.36 GHz, 3.95 GHz and 10.48 GHz, covering Sand X-band applications. The absorber is ultracompact (0.112 k) in size and ultra-thin (0.018 k) in thickness at the lowest resonating frequency. The normalized impedance, constitutive electromagnetic parameters, electric field and surface current distribution have been studied to understand the physical mechanism of the triple-band absorption. Furthermore, the absorber is analyzed with different polarization and incident angles for transverse electric waves. The proposed MMA has been experimentally demonstrated to verify the results obtained from simulations. Moreover, the effect of over-layer thickness is investigated to examine the sensing application of the absorber.