Scar Tissue | Body Map

A slantwise take on memoir writing via mini biographies of some of the marks on my skin

May 18, 2025

This piece was written in response to a creative writing exercise shared by

last month that sparked my interest and led to me setting aside the other pieces of writing I was working on so that I could follow that spark down a very pleasurable rabbit hole! It feels a little more vulnerable, a little less polished than the other pieces I’ve published here this year. It has more in common perhaps with the pieces I wrote in November 2024, when I challenged myself to write and publish 30,000 words in 30 days (30k hath November) - although at that time I had zero subscribers and didn’t realise I’d set my publication to private until around the 20th, so I was really writing just for myself.

The exercise is called ‘Body Map of My Life’ and Lily describes how she found it in a book called You Are Here, Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. She explains that:

In the ‘Body Map of My Life’ Booher lists the marks and scars across her body and from where they originate, to form an understanding of herself through the experiences and intrusions her body has been through. What you read in the end is a type of autobiography, but through those experiences that have left their mark on a body. It might be a scar on her lower lip, caused from an ice skating incident, or a growth on her right shoulder from too much exposure to the sun, or even something abstract like a ‘worry center in depths of psyche’, caused by ‘marriage, motherhood, middle age’. Her diagnosis is: ‘increased responsibility, less spontaneity’. And treatment: ‘New blond hairpiece, spur-of-the-moment bike rides, and a toe ring’.

And a Dog

Body Map of My Life

Many years ago, in another life, I taught a group of recovering addicts at Hackney Recovery Service. Every Wednesday I would hop on my bike to ride the few miles to Mare Street in Hackney, London, and it became the thing I looked forward to each week. It’s where I cut my teeth as a teacher and the work was massively rewarding. I will write more about this experience in another post - and how it led to me and my teaching partner, Zoe Gilbert, editing and publishing an anthology of recovery stories called…

3 months ago · 25 likes · 6 comments · Dr Lily Dunn

If you are interested in memoir or life writing and are not already subscribed to Lily’s publication And a Dog, I highly recommend that you do so! She is an expert in all things memoir and I’m eagerly awaiting the publication of her new book INTO BEING: The radical craft of memoir and its power to transform this October. Lily runs a monthly Memoir WIP Surgery for paid subscribers and publishes weekly essays on different elements of writing memoir.

I really enjoyed this writing exercise and found it really effective in helping me to unearth embodied memories - both of the specific circumstances that led to each scar I wrote about, but also of my life at that time (where I was living, who I was living with, what was important to me then). The exercise helped me to tap into a clearer sense of what it felt like to be 5, 14, 30, 33 years old. I felt a closer connection to those past versions of myself than I’m normally able to call up when remembering past events.

In mapping my own scars in words I was interested in how often I mentioned my mum in these mini biographies, while my dad was only mentioned once. Maybe this just reflects which parent provided most of the day to day care for me during childhood (some of the peak years for scar formation!). I’m interested in whether there might also be something there around the different forms my connection to each of my parents takes. In my last post (linked below), I wrote about feeling that my relationship with my mum was based in our bodies, in the sensory, embodied experience of spending time together, while my relationship with my dad is more based in words and communication, sharing ideas and stories. Perhaps that’s one reason Mum showed up more often than Dad in these accounts of how I got my scars.

Compost | May

Ellen Chapman

May 11

This is the fifth instalment of my monthly compost posts: a round up of life currently, some short pieces of life writing, my bird of the month, a tarot card or reading for the month, plus potentially some thoughts on things I’m currently reading/ watching/ listening to.

Read full story

Item 2: oblong patch of puckered skin maybe 1 cm long and 0.5 cm wide on the outside edge of my right eye socket

Cause: tripping and falling onto a ceramic strawberry planter while running in just my socks on the garden patio when I was 4. One of my earliest sequential memories.

Diagnosis: deep cut which bled a lot (as head wounds tend to) and thoroughly freaked out both me and my mum.

Treatment: trip to A&E where I was given an X-ray, butterfly stitches, a certificate of bravery and a bag of dolly mixture (in that order). I developed a healthy respect for the strawberry planter and for the importance of putting my shoes on.

Follow up: a good story to tell when we swopped injury stories in the playground, one up on my younger brother’s own tale of pre-schooler patio-related injury (he tripped and fell headfirst onto the concrete steps by the patio door) because he didn’t get given any sweets at the hospital.

OS maps have doubled for wallpaper in at least two rooms of our house this year (and as wallpaper provide an excellent way of planning walks or days out)

Item 3: two holes in my left earlobe, one hole in my right

Cause: getting my ears pierced. The first pair aged 13 in the hairdressers in the village where I’d had my hair cut from the age of 3, after years of negotiation with Mum to be allowed to do so (she originally said I could get my ears pierced when I qas 16, but I wore her down). The second hole in my left ear aged 33 in Claire’s Accessories in Durham, on a whim, sometime in the two weeks between Mum’s death and her funeral.

Diagnosis: piercing gun, a feeling of pressure around my earlobe followed by a solid thunk and instant of bright, flaring pain, leaving behind a gold plated stud and cherry red skin. The second time I was seeking out that remembered sensation, unconsciously searching for a physical pain to match, or attempt to draw the poison from, the psychological pain of waiting.

Treatment: careful application of surgical spirit twice daily, steeling my nerve to gently turn the studs a quarter or half turn each morning.

Follow up: the first time, a contented feeling of not being a child anymore, as if the new holes in my ears had ushered me into young womanhood; the second time, endless questions from my 3 year old son about why I’d only got one ear pierced and the rapid realisation that nothing was going to make the waiting any easier.

Item 8: silvery 10 cm ridged line across my lower abdomen

Cause: emergency caesarean section when my eldest son was born.

Diagnosis: the easy answer is that my pelvis was too narrow or the baby’s head was too big. I think the truer answer lay in my uncertainty and anxiety around giving birth, leading to me unquestioningly following the midwife’s advice to spend most of the first stage of labour seated semi-reclined on a hospital bed and strapped to a foetal heart monitor. Maybe if I had stayed upright and active the baby would have been in a better position when it came time to push.

Treatment: three nights in hospital following his birth, followed by weeks of desperately searching for routes to and from our house that avoided a set of speed bumps that sent shockwaves through my whole body when we drove over them. Ignoring the firm medical advice not to lift anything heavier than 10 lb for at least a month, because that would have meant being unable to lift my baby out of his Moses basket when he cried.

Follow up: several months of agonising over whether I had somehow failed at childbirth or motherhood by not having had a “natural” birth. More confidence the second time around to follow my own intuition and desires over the midwife’s advice.

Item 9: ink at the centre of my lower back, my first tattoo

Cause: spontaneous decision to get a tattoo at the end of freshers’ week in the autumn of the year 2000. I’d made fast and firm friends with two girls on my corridor in halls, and one of them was getting a tattoo. We both went with her and I decided on the spot that I would get one too.

Diagnosis: random tangle of black lines, slightly tribal in appearance, chosen from the available tattooist’s flash sheets, partly based on its price (£35).

Treatment: Savlon cream applied twice a day, revelling in the way the cropped tops and low slung jeans of the early 2000s showed off my tattoo perfectly. Like getting my ears pierced when I was 13, it felt like this intentional body modification marked my entry into a new stage of adulthood.

Follow up: I successfully hid my tattoo from my mum for several months, until one day when my parents were visiting me in halls and I leant forward to pick something off my desk. My top rode up, my tattoo appeared and I heard Mum’s sharp intake of breath. My stomach dropped.

Item 10: mark I have never seen due to its location or because it did not leave a visible scar

Cause: perineal tear during the birth of my youngest son.

Diagnosis: me and my husband make babies with large heads - or babies with heads larger than my pelvis can comfortably accommodate.

Treatment: stitched up by the registrar in the same operating theatre that I delivered my eldest son in, while my husband was introducing him to his new baby brother in a room across the corridor. The midwife told me I was lucky that this particular registrar was on duty because “her stitches are beautiful, they’re so small it’s like embroidery”.

Follow up: discharged from hospital the day after giving birth. In a state of euphoria at this freedom and mobility, I insisted on walking with my husband to pick up our eldest son from nursery that afternoon, a half mile round trip with our newborn strapped to my chest. It was joyful, but I spent the following day exhausted and marooned on the sofa in the backroom while my milk came in and he cluster fed.

Item 12: rough patch of skin on my right knee cap

Cause: a fall while balancing on the raised concrete edge of a municipal flower bed like it was a tightrope, aged 5.

Diagnosis: resentment of a child who had recently become a big sister. I was not holding Mum’s hand as I usually did when I balanced because she was pushing a pram with my baby brother in it, and I was a seething ball of indignation that he was taking her attention away from me.

Treatment: being wrapped up in a big hug from my mum (which to be honest was probably exactly what I was yearning for before I fell), application of a large salmon coloured sticking plaster when we got home.

Follow up: discovery of how much having a sticking plaster removed from my skin hurt, gradual realisation that maybe my little brother wasn’t so bad and actually it could be fun to have a playmate that lived in the same house as me - crucially, one that was younger and smaller than me so that I could be the leader (I still haven’t quite come to terms with him now being 5 inches taller than me).

Item 13: lightning bolt shape of smooth, shiny skin on the outside of my right ankle

Cause: slipped and fell while clambering over wet, seaweed covered rocks on the beach at the bottom of our hill.

Diagnosis: leg gashed open by sharp edges of barnacle shells, what felt like an alarming amount of blood to me aged 5 or 6. I think it was probably the summer after my brother was born, so this may have been a dad and daughter visit to the beach while Mum stayed home with the baby (napping while he napped?).

Treatment: carried home by my dad (luckily our house was only a 5-10 minute walk away, depending on whether you went at parent in a panic or dawdling child pace). I have a vivid memory of being held in Dad’s arms and looking down at the blood welling up from my skin and dripping steadily on to the moving pavement beneath me, thinking that we were leaving a trail behind us like Hansel and Gretel. My blood was the same rusty red as the leather of my sandals.