When the skin breaks

It happens eventually to most people who use anything harder than a hand, and the reason it goes badly is almost never the graze itself. It is the twenty minutes afterwards, when one person is apologising and the other is insisting they are fine and neither of them is dealing with it.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

Two adults, one of whom has a graze that neither of them intended. This page is what to do about it, in the order I would do it.

Why skin splits

Rarely because somebody swung as hard as they could. The common causes are duller than that.

Tight skin over bone is the main one. Skin that has been stretched taut splits where relaxed skin would bruise, which is why a deep fold at the hips is riskier than the same implement used on a supported body. That is set out on bent over a table.

Landing on an existing mark is the second. A stroke that arrives on skin already swollen and inflamed from four earlier ones is being applied to tissue with no give left in it. This is what makes counting and spreading the strokes about protective rather than fussy.

Then a cane tip, which concentrates a lot of energy into a narrow line and is the implement most likely to break skin at a force that feels moderate. Thin skin breaks earlier, which includes older skin, skin that has been on long-term steroid creams, and skin on somebody taking an anticoagulant. See health conditions and medication.

And going in cold. Skin that has not been warmed up has less blood in it and less elasticity, and it marks and splits at lower force than the same skin twenty minutes later. There is a whole page on that at warm-up, and this is the least glamorous reason it matters.

Stop, and say that you are stopping

Not one more. Not finishing the set. The scene is over.

Say it out loud, in your own voice, rather than trailing off and going quiet. Somebody face down who suddenly hears nothing happening will assume they have done something wrong, and a person in that state will fill a silence with the worst available explanation. A sentence does it: that has broken the skin, we are stopping, you are not in trouble.

What to actually do

• Wash your hands first. This is the step everybody skips and it is the one that matters most.
• Look at it in decent light. Most of what looks alarming through adrenaline is a graze the size of a fingernail.
• Rinse gently with clean running water. Do not scrub, and do not pick at anything.
• Bleeding stops with pressure. Clean pad, firm and steady, several minutes without lifting it to peek.
• Cover it with a clean non-fluffy dressing. Cotton wool sheds fibres into a wound and is the wrong thing to reach for.
• Then leave it alone.

What not to do. No alcohol, no neat antiseptic and no spirits poured into an open wound, all of which hurt a great deal and damage the tissue that is trying to heal. No creams that were meant for something else, and no arnica or bruise preparations on broken skin. Do not cover it and carry on, which is the single commonest error and turns a graze into a fortnight of trouble. And no long hot bath that evening.

The next few days

Most of these are unremarkable and heal like any other graze. The reason to pay attention is that this particular part of the body is warm, covered and sat on, which is a friendlier environment for an infection than a knee.

Look for redness spreading outwards from the edges rather than staying put, heat, swelling that increases after the first day, pus, or a wound that smells. Feeling generally unwell, shivery or feverish is the one that should move fastest, because that is not a local problem any more.

Any of those means get seen rather than wait it out. A pharmacist is a perfectly good first stop and needs no appointment. NHS 111 will tell you whether it needs more, at any hour, and nobody there needs to know how it happened. If your tetanus vaccinations are not up to date, that is a reasonable thing to raise with a GP.

Embarrassment is the thing that turns a manageable injury into a lasting one. That is the actual risk on this page, rather than the graze.

Blood, between two people

Handled briefly and without drama. Broken skin in contact with somebody else's blood is the one genuine transmission route in this activity, and it is the reason the rules below exist rather than any squeamishness.

An implement that has drawn blood belongs to one person from that point on. It is not lent, not borrowed at a party, and not used on somebody else afterwards. Disposable gloves cost almost nothing and are worth having in the house for exactly this moment. If you play with more than one person, that rule tightens rather than relaxes, and there is more on the surrounding conversation at more than one partner.

The implements afterwards

Non-porous things can be cleaned properly: silicone, sealed acrylic, metal. Warm water and detergent, then whatever disinfectant the manufacturer suggests, then dry.

Leather and wood cannot be sterilised, whatever anybody tells you. Both are porous, both absorb, and no amount of wiping makes a wooden paddle safe to pass to somebody else once it has broken skin. Those become single-person items, and a strap or a cane with somebody's history in it is not a shared object. More on care and storage at cleaning and caring for implements.

The part that actually matters

The graze is a graze. The evening is where the damage usually happens.

Two predictable reactions. The person receiving decides she has ruined it, or that she is fragile, or that she should have been able to take it, and starts reassuring the other person while bleeding gently onto a tea towel. The person who delivered it goes somewhere much worse: a quiet, cold conviction that they are dangerous and had no business doing this. That second one is top drop arriving early, and it can put somebody off entirely.

So say the boring things out loud. Nobody is in trouble. This happens, it is a known consequence of using hard things on soft people, and it is why you agreed what to do if it did.

Deal with the skin, then sit down together, then check in again in two days when both of you can think, exactly as on aftercare. If it happened because somebody went past what was agreed rather than because skin is skin, that is a different conversation and it is at when it goes wrong.

Making it less likely

Warm up properly, which is most of it. Spread the strokes around instead of stacking them in one place. Look at the skin between rounds in decent light, and treat it going shiny, tight or dusky as the signal to stop rather than as an interesting development. Slow down as the marks come up rather than after.

And stop one stroke before the number you had in mind. Nobody has ever regretted the last one they did not deliver.