OUR SKIN fixes the boundaries of our physical selves and separates us from the rest of the world. It is the wrapping on the package of flesh, blood, and bone that is our body. Pliant, elastic, able to heal itself, it is where we end and the rest of the cosmos begins.
Exquisitely sensitive and able to register the faintest nuances of atmospheric change, our skin lays us bare to a constant bombardment of sensation.
Through our skin we contact the world; with it we touch and are touched. The skin alerts us to texture, temperature, pressure, pain and pleasure. It is scratched, kneaded, rubbed, and pinched and in response is soothed, stung, and irritated, along with our emotions. Demanding to be stroked and massaged, it flushes and blushes, tickles and tingles, itches and burns. Exterior stimuli prompt it to exude sweat and other fluids from its pores and glands. Freckles, dimples, wrinkles, scars, stretch marks, and moles occur like features on a landscape and the skin itself can range in colour from the milkiest white to an intense blue-black. Eruptions of boils, shingles, or pimples may mar its surface, causing pain and embarrassment. Alarmingly, it bruises and bleeds. Blistering and flaking, puckering and stretching—and feeling, always feeling—the skin is in a constant state of response, alerting the body to the conditions that surround it.
Our skin is unique to each of us; not even identical twins will share the same fingerprint. The pattern of whorls, ridges, and lines found on the tips of the fingers are peculiar to every individual, and can be used to identify us or determine where we have been and what we have touched.
If the skin can leave traces alluding to past events, it is tempting to believe that it can also reveal intimations of the future. If you gaze at your palm for long enough it can come to look like a map, or even a landscape; perhaps the mouth of a mighty river delta, or an aerial view of channel country in flood.
The romance of having your fortune mapped out in the contours and swirls of your palm, the etched lines crisscrossing the fleshy pad and revealing the key to your fortune, is seductive. It’s an intoxicating idea that you carry the secrets of your life cradled in your hand and yet concealed, only those versed in the lore of chiromancy able to unlock the secrets there.
The scene is easy to conjure up: the wrinkled crone, swathed in appropriately bohemian garb, firmly grasping your hand in hers. She turns your palm upward and traces her finger (be-ringed and grubby) along the lines and creases there. Lovers, children, spouses, health, wealth and contentment: all the veiled secrets of your future are revealed by this inheritor of Romany wisdom and relayed to you when you cross the gypsy’s own dusky palm with silver.
The palm—owing to its sensitivity, and because it can be hidden by a curl of the fingers and therefore also be exposed—is a locus for both vulnerability and a sort of sacredness. It is here that the stigmata, the marks resembling bloody wounds which mimic those inflicted by the nails that fastened Christ to the cross, generally occur. Whether you believe stigmata expose a charlatan or someone experiencing intense identification with the passion of Christ, in reality, those iron spikes were probably driven through the base of the hand in order to support the dragging weight of an adult male, rather than through the palm.
Nevertheless, the palm remains a site of nuance. We hold up our hands with the palms facing outwards as a sign of submission or surrender, but also paradoxically as a sign of dominance, defiance, or triumph.
Even among those impervious to romance and dismissive of anything with even a whiff of the paranormal, the skin has a reputation for sensitivity that goes beyond an ability to perceive the physical world. We feel a niggling heat on the back of our neck, and turn to find the eyes of another are trained upon us. When a sudden, unexplained shiver snakes up our back, we explain it by saying someone just walked over our grave.
A similar force was at play when one of the three witches, sensing the approach on a Scottish heath of that soon-to-be slayer of kings and slaughterer of babies, Macbeth, told her sisters, ‘By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.’
Itching skin is an omen—of receiving money or of giving it away, depending on which palm it is that you have to scratch. And whether we count ourselves as superstitious or not, when the skin of our ears burns red we can’t but wonder who is talking about us.
Given the centrality of skin to our existence, it is no wonder that our language is rich with allusions to it. In these aphorisms and adages, the qualities of skin deemed inherent to it include its sensitivity, its alignment with the self, and the snugness with which it enfolds us.
‘Thin-skinned’ is how we describe someone who is overly reactive; the charge is levelled at those who take offence at any perceived slight, acting wounded when no attack or injury was intended. In the same vein, being told you have the ‘hide of an elephant’ may be taken as a sign of grudging admiration that you are impervious to insults, or as a slight on your insensitive nature.
Something distasteful is said to make our ‘skin crawl’. We’re all familiar with this sensation: the skin recoiling as if independent of the rest of the body. Shoulders hunch and quiver, prickles of sensation radiate up the back of our neck, and our scalp tightens round the bones of the skull. Often, it’s the very things that crawl—spiders, rats, centipedes (or people whom we feel share similar attributes)—that have this effect on our irritable hides.
Someone who has ‘saved their own skin’ is burdened with the implication that they have abandoned others in order to ensure their own survival. It may be that they leapt from a burning building while others were still struggling to reach the window; or perhaps they disassociated themselves from a failed venture in the workplace. In either scenario, the insinuation is that they have been less than valiant.
People are admired for being in touch with their feelings—able to not only identify their emotions but to express them honestly. My mother would threaten to take payment for a favour ‘out of my hide’, a nod to the idea that the skin has currency.
Similarly, to ‘have skin in the game’ is to risk your own money in a business venture. Skin is a tenuously thin membrane, and so a goal narrowly achieved is done ‘by the skin of your teeth’, and a ‘skinflint’ is so mean he would try to fleece the nonexistent integument from a piece of stone. We might pronounce that ‘beauty is only skin deep’ in an attempt to counter praise of a gorgeous individual, casting doubt on the calibre of their character.
‘Shedding one’s skin’ is both an image of growth and of re-invention, and yet skin, quixotically, is also a symbol of intransigence. The rhetorical question posed in Jeremiah 13:23, ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard change his spots?’ makes the point that one accustomed to doing evil is unlikely to alter their behaviour and do good.
To be comfortable in your own unchangeable skin is to be at ease with the person you have become: your metaphorical skin ‘fits like a glove’, and you wear your imperfections and idiosyncrasies lightly.
Someone filled with vigour may be described as ‘fit to jump out of her skin’, her energy almost unable to be contained by the constrictions of her close-fitting epidermis.
Someone who ‘gets under our skin’ may do so in a pleasurable or abrasive fashion. Regardless of whether we’re drawn to or repelled by such a person, their existence provokes a reaction akin to that of a splinter. Impossible to ignore, we must poke and worry at the source of irritation, raking at it with our nails until it’s dislodged.
Most crucially, for all its symbolism and associated imagery, the skin, made up of layers and stretched over the entire body, is our body’s largest organ. It exists in contrast with the more visceral images of pulsing wet muscles and the red masses of heart, liver, and kidney that usually spring to mind when we contemplate our organs. These are hidden and slightly repulsive, glistening dangerously, revealed only when the body itself is laid open. The skin, as an ideal, is smooth and pliant, inviting connection, promising containment, and defining beauty.
An adult’s skin-surface area will measure between one-and-half to two square metres, and be between one and two millimetres deep. Contrast that with the whale