Skin Deep

zero in on the body's largest organ

People often focus on the skin of the young or beautiful, it’s hue, texture, or clarity, but skin, like everything, gets more interesting when it’s less than perfect. Grooves, veins, spots and outcroppings, from moles to pustulant acne can all be used to convey essential information about the life their owners — or in the case of Gabriel García Márquez’s Don Fernando in One Hundred Years of Solitude, their deaths: “his skin broken out in pestilential sores and cooking slowly in a frothy stew with bubbles like live pearls.”

To push the envelope on your character descriptions, try skipping the basic facial or bodily features and focussing on the flaws of their skin instead.