Covered with Scars

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A character's entire body, is covered in hundreds of scars. This trope is used to show that the character is a Badass, a veteran or a Broken Bird who lived though a lot of fights or suffered a great deal of pain and torture. Often times these scars will be linked to mental scars related to how they gained them.

If the scars are self-inflicted expect the character to be more than a little off.

Related to Good Scars, Evil Scars, Every Scar Has a Story and Scars Are Forever. May involve a Scar Survey. See also Frozen Face.


Examples of Covered with Scars include:

Anime and Manga

  • In Trigun, Vash's complete upper body is basically one large scar, including his missing arm. He calls it the price for being a pacifist in a gunslinger world.
  • Bleach:
    • Yamamoto Genryuusai, the commander of the Gotei 13
    • Kenpachi
    • Mayuri, underneath his getup. Due to his constant doing 'modification' surgeries on himself.
  • Black Jack of the manga of the same name is covered in scars from stepping on a landmine as a child.
  • Berserk: With the amount of punishment that Guts regularly takes at the hands of his demonic enemies, he's accumulated quite a few scars over his career. Including a missing eye and forearm.
  • Black Lagoon: Balalaika has burn scars all over the front of her body, including almost half her face as the result of surviving a frag grenade at close range.
  • Baki the Grappler, along with several supporting characters. The most notable is Hanayama.
  • Manji from Blade of the Immortal has scars on every inch of his body... which occasionally open up.
  • Rurouni Kenshin - Shishio's full-body scarring is from one incident, but having almost all of your skin be second- or third-degree burns can't be pleasant.
  • Yu Yu Hakusho: Sensui. A result of a combination of Macho Masochism and being completely insane.
  • Gene Starwind from Outlaw Star. It's implied that many of his scars are the result of his escape pod crash-landing on Sentinel III when he was 15.
  • Eishun Konoe in Mahou Sensei Negima.
  • Over the course of his series, Golgo 13 has developed a number of scars, visible when he removes his shirt. In the first chapter, he was unmarked.
  • Nanashi from Sword of the Stranger is covered in scars from his days as a Samurai.
  • Soul Eater
    • Black☆Star after his fight with Mifune.
    • Stein, in part a self-inflicted example due to the fact he sees even himself as a test-subject for whatever catches his attention.
  • Randal Oland from Pumpkin Scissors. He got most of them during the war that occurred before the series begins.
  • Tsukune from Rosario + Vampire has been portrayed as this during his more recent shirtless scenes. Not surprising, considering all the things he's endured.
  • Whitebeard from One Piece is covered with scars on every part of his bod, the only wounds on his back from the times he was stabbed in the front and the weapon came out his back. Of course, being Whitebeard, these were only flesh wounds.
  • In the Frieza saga of Dragonball Z we see that Vegeta has scars all over his chest and back.
  • Kyoshiro from Ginga Densetsu Weed has scars all over his body. They're either from an abusive father, or they're from fighting other dogs.
  • Illness from Baccano! has countless scars under her dress as a result of SAMPLE's "worship" of her.
  • All three of Madaraki sisters from Franken Fran have them, due to being artificial humans.


Comic Books

  • Batman's body is often shown to be covered in scars from his multiple fights. Same goes for the rest of the Bat-family, special notice maybe for Cassandra Cain, who has a lot of bullet wounds from her bullet dodging training by her father.
  • Zsasz from the Batman comics. His scars are self inflicted, and each one represents one of his victims.
  • Daredevil is another one who's covered in scars.
  • Deadpool is covered in scars or tumors or both.
  • Marv from Sin City has many scars across his face. It's likely they're all over his body, judging from his fighting style.
  • The Spirit had no scars in his 40s adventures in serials. However, in the Darwyn Cooke revival, one shirtless scene shows his numerous scars in the back, from his numerous adventures and crime fighting. It's presumed he has many too on his front side.
  • Like Zsasz, Wolverine villain Mister X also has a self-inflicted scar for each person he's killed. His, however, are arranged in an elaborate pattern.
  • Jukko Hämäläinen of Stormwatch: Team Achilles is covered head to toe in scars from the period of time he spent resisting his brother's attempts to transform him into a superhuman.


Film

  • In Star Wars, Darth Vader beneath his iconic black amour.
  • Kroenen from the Hellboy film.
  • Dr. Weir ends up bald, naked and covered with scars for the final showdown of Event Horizon.
  • Nightcrawler, in the second X-Men film, is covered, from his pointy ears to all four of his toes, in rather artistic-looking raised scars. They're self-inflicted; apparently, he felt the need to punish himself for... something. He seems to be a bit of a harmless milksop, so it's somewhat baffling and/or depressing to think about what he could possibly have to feel so guilty about. It could be related to the fact he's a devout Catholic.
  • Darkman was covered in scars from burns.
  • V from V for Vendetta is covered in burn scars.
  • Parodied in a ridiculously surreal Hungarian movie, which among other absurd things, featured the main character showing off his scars, starting from minor ones, to big ones like the neck of a cola bottle sticking out of his side, and eventually ending with him opening a door on his chest and revealing some sort of animal in a treadmill. Quite naturally, nobody ever talks of this again.


Literature

  • Beloved - the network of whip scars on Sethe's back seems like a growing tree.
  • Anita Blake is covered with scars from years of fighting supernatural creatures.
  • Jasper from Twilight, due to his past as a Blood Knight.
  • Harry Dresden of the The Dresden Files is a subversion. With the impressive number of wounds he has taken he should be covered in scars, but given a half dozen years of healing a wizard's body will completely heal scars back to normal flesh. The collection of scars he manages to collect even while his body is erasing them is still impressive.
  • Mowgli in The Jungle Book:

"What is there to be afraid of?" said the priest. "Look at the marks on his arms and legs. They are the bites of wolves. He is but a wolf-child run away from the jungle."
Of course, in playing together, the cubs had often nipped Mowgli harder than they intended, and there were white scars all over his arms and legs. But he would have been the last person in the world to call these bites, for he knew what real biting meant.

  • Shadowhunters from The Mortal Instruments trilogy are covered in scars from years of being marked with runes.
  • Some of the Canim from the Codex Alera series have this, showing what battle-hardened warriors they are. Some are so scarred they barely have any fur. Also the Canim Ritualists, who do Blood Magic, and thus have cut themselves quite a bit.
  • Kvothe from The King Killer Chronicles
  • Druss the Legend in Legend by David Gemmell (although it is mentioned that he had noticeably fewer scars on his back, because he always faced up to danger).
  • The unnamed protagonist from The Gargoyle after his accident.
  • Peacebreakers:
  • Miles Vorkosigan of the Vorkosigan Saga has had a ton of surgeries from broken bones, bone replacements, and a needle grenade.
  • Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody from Harry Potter, as a result of years of fighting Dark wizards. He also has a wooden leg and a chunk missing from his nose.
  • Discworld:
    • In Interesting Times, Rincewind's adventures in the last new books have apparently left their mark: When he is brought back to Ankh-Morpork, the other wizards remark that he's covered in scars - but mainly on his back.
    • Another Discworld example is 71-Hour Ahmed in Jingo, whose face is covered in scars (though it's not known whether the rest of him is.)
  • In Battle Royale, Shogo Kawada is covered in scars, causing the other kids to speculate on how he ended up with so many. He got them in the previous Program.
  • Early in Oathbound, a young stablegirl sees Tarma coming out of the bath, and is shocked at her scars; Tarma takes the opportunity to hammer home to her that going adventuring is not a thing to do for fun.
  • Like Kyoshiro from the above example in anime, Tigerstar from Warrior Cats has a pelt covered in scars. He even has a scarred nose and an ear nearly split in two.
  • Carnival from the Deepgate Codex series. Most of her scars are self-inflicted (a rate of once per month tends to pile up over three thousand years), but quite a few of them are from fights with Deepgate's military, and her single rope scar is a bit of a special case.

Theatre

Video Games

  • In Planescape: Torment, The Nameless One is the poster child for this trope. It's kind of hard to tell on account of him having so many that he hasn't got much skin left to contrast against the scar tissue.
  • In Quest for Glory III, the survivor of the peace mission is covered in scars after the group is attacked by demons.
  • In Fable I and its sequel there's a good chance your character will end up like this as they acquire scars rapidly when they're hurt in combat.
  • Commander Shepard from Mass Effect has a large number of scars covering cybernetic implants.
  • Zangief from Street Fighter, who got his scars by wrestling with bears.
  • Jecht's torso and arms are covered in tens of scars, being a Badass Walking Shirtless Scene and all.
  • Sergei Dragunov of the Tekken series has two scars on his face (a large one running through his lips and a smaller one across his nose), and, if the player opts to make him shirtless in Tekken 6, it can be seen that he has several scars, ranging from large to small (including one that appears to be a bullet wound), on his arms and torso.
  • Hanako from Katawa Shoujo has extensive burn scars covering half of her body.

Web Comics

Web Original

Western Animation

Real Life

  • After one of the the two Night Surface Battles of Guadalcanal(a nasty melee where the American and Japanese forces were so close and tangled up that it was almost like a galley battle), the USS San Francisco put into port with 26 shell holes on her.


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