Clothing-Concealed Injury

'Tis but a scratch!

"And for that, you got a wound you had to keep hidden when we showed up. Couldn't take those dirty gloves of yours off when you came inside or to take coffee or to shake hands."

— Gustav "Old Red" Amlingmeyer, Holmes on the Range, "Curious Incidents"

Everyone gets hurt sometimes, but not everyone wants others to know it. Maybe it's because they'll be doted on and fussed over. Maybe it's because they'll be scolded for getting hurt if it was caused by them being careless or clumsy. Maybe the person who finds out will raise Hell if the injuries were caused by another person. Maybe it's that they don't want them to be treated, likely due to a fear of doctors or hospitals. Whatever the reason, they need to keep it a secret. However, their injury is in a location that would make it highly visible to others. There must be a way to hide their injuries without anyone knowing...

Clothing-Concealed Injury is when a character uses a piece of clothing to keep their wounds or scars a secret from others. This is often done with sunglasses to hide black eyes, scarves to hide neck injuries, or long shirts or pants or gloves to hide wounds on arms or legs. Makeup also gets used for concealment purposes, usually to cover up cuts or bruises on the face. Technically, an eyepatch is this, but it's such a specific article of clothing that's not worn otherwise, so people know it's usually covering up some sort of Eye Scream. Occasionally, this clothing is something that the character usually doesn't wear or is not suitable for the current situation or weather, such as wearing scarves and jackets when it's warm out, making other characters suspicious. The character will sometimes make strange excuses as to why they are wearing these clothes, which will raise further suspicion.

Inevitably, the injuries will end up getting revealed, either by accident, force, or by willingness of the character (depending on the situation). The character will then be scolded for not telling anyone that they were hurt, which may lead to An Aesop being delivered about why you shouldn't hide injuries from others.

A supertrope to Secret Stab Wound and Hiding the Handicap. Can overlap with Revealing Cover Up if wearing a certain piece of clothing makes it obvious that a character is hiding something. Often occurs with people who have done Self-Harm, have been in some kind of fight, or are a victim of Domestic Abuse. Bring My Red Jacket (and, humorously, Bring My Brown Pants) are related tropes wherein a character anticipates the future need to conceal an injury. May be one reason a character wears Conspicuous Gloves. Compare Masking the Deformity when someone uses a mask to cover up facial injuries. Contrast Cut Himself Shaving where the injuries are visible, but the reason is concealed with an excuse.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Cesare - Il Creatore che ha distrutto, Angelo knows that the culprit who started the fire must have a burn scar on his shoulder from that night when his robes caught fire. Because they're usually covered by clothing, it isn't until much later that Angelo finds out that the culprit is Roberto, who accidentally reveals that shoulder injury when saving Angelo from drowning.
• In Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Cloud Strife wears a black cloth covering his left arm to hide his Geostigma' signs. He gets rid of it after being cured by Aerith's Great Gosphel.
• Noriaki Kakyoin from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders often hides his eye scars (a long but thin vertical scar over each eye that he received after being nearly blinded by N'Doul's stand, Geb) behind some sick ass shades◊.
• In My Hero Academia, All Might (the person in the trope image) suffered a severe injury five years ago that destroyed one of his lungs and most of his stomach, leaving him an emaciated husk of his former self. While he's able to use his Quirk, One For All, to puff himself back up to fighting form for a short time, all of his clothing is designed to hide the scar left behind from prying eyes. For instance, his swimsuit is a one-piece that covers his entire torso and his hero costume is similarly well-covered.
• Vash the Stampede's long red coat that he wears nearly all the time from Trigun is used to conceal the massive amount of scars and injuries he's taken from fights over the years due to his staunch pacifism.

Comic Books

• In League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Mina Harker always wears scarves to conceal the hideous scars on her neck from Dracula's attack.
• Red Robin: Tim's civilian outfits stop including the T-shirts he was so fond of during Robin (1993) to hide his rather conspicuous collection of scars.
• In The Wicked + The Divine, Baphomet shows up to a party with his sunglasses firmly glued to his face. When Laura accidentally knocks them off, it's revealed that he's concealing the black eye and scratches that Morrigan gave him.

Fan Works

• Bitter Tears: An Anon-A-Miss Fic: In Chapter 6 of Life Goes On, the sequel, it's revealed that Sunset has scars from turning into a demon during the Fall Formal hidden under her clothes. She usually changes for P.E. in the shower stalls so people don't see them, but Sunset doesn't care at this point, so she changes out in the open to everyone's shock. Even her friends are shocked by this, as even they didn't know about them.
• Brother's Intuition, an Onward one-shot, has Barley walk in on Ian covering up a bruise on his chin with Laurel's foundation. Ian claims that he got it from falling while getting off the bus, but Barley doesn't buy it, so he goes to the school the next day and sees Ian getting beaten up by bullies.
• Fractured Fates: In Chapter 5, Hiroshi's shirt was hiding the electrical burns all over his torso, which were omitted from the case's Monokuma File.
• Hinterlands: Gale's scarf hides the way her throat has been sliced open, which reveals her as a necromantic thrall.
• The King Nobody Wanted: Or rather clothing concealed disability. The first time Jon meets Rys Chelsted, he observes that the new Master of Coin's long robe completely covers his legs. It's weeks, if not months, later before Rys has to lift his robe up while climbing a steep flight of stairs and Jon sees that he has clubfeet, at which point Rys' Appropriated Appellation nickname "Aerys the Frog" and bitterness toward dwarves and hunchbacks being court fools take on a whole new meaning.
• The Power of the Equinox: Scootaloo is revealed to be covered in bruises and scars, a testimony of what her alcoholic adoptive father puts her through. In order to appear normal, she covers them up every day by using the makeup kit she gained from Sweetie Belle as a Hearth's Warming Eve present.
• Somos Familia: Ernesto wears his trademark long-sleeved white jacket even when it's blistering hot outside and gets nervous when asked to remove it. His jacket sleeves cover up the injuries on his wrists from a Happily Failed Suicide.
• The Supermen: Wesker attempts this in Chapter 2 before trying to get to another Tricell base, since he is very aware that his "allies" at Tricell would turn on him if they realised he was seriously injured. It would probably be less obvious than most examples of the trope since he isn't dressed any differently to usual. It ends up partially deconstructed since putting clothes on over unhealed third-degree burns is incredibly painful (including quite a bit of skin coming off.)
• Velma Dinkley's Beginning: Velma tries to hide the bruises she's gotten from Daphne's friends. She's afraid that if Shaggy, Fred, and Daphne see them, they'll tell her parents, which might lead to more beatings from the girls and she'll probably have to move again. She wants to stay in Coolsville with her new friends.
• Wondering: Danny has a stash of clothing that he specifically uses to hide injuries received during ghost fights. He has a particular preference for an old red and green long-sleeved shirt with several minor, innocuous stains on it which make bloodstains harder to spot among them. When he's rendered unable to fight, Sam and Tucker take up the role and consequently start using the emergency clothing stash as well, and Danny catches Sam wearing that same shirt to hide a wound on one of her arms.
• In the Star Wars Rebels fanfiction A Sword to Pass, after Sabine is injured she wears her helmet to hide the scar out of shame. This doesn't stop Ezra from removing it to see the bandages.

Films — Animation

• Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay: Reverse-Flash is one of the main villains of the movie and one of many trying to get their hands on the fabled Get-Out-Of-Hell-Free Card. Then we find out why — he takes off his mask and reveals a hole in his forehead. This is the same Reverse-Flash from Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox who was shot in the head by Batman, and he used his powers to slow his bodily processes split-seconds before dying, and he's desperate to find the card before his time runs out.

Films — Live-Action

• One flashback in Every Last One of Them shows an angry confrontation between Melissa and her father Jake. She tells him he is back home and to take off his sunglasses and look at her. Jake takes them off and it is revealed that his large wraparound sunglasses were concealing a huge combat wound on his cheek.
• In The Hands of Orlac, Vasseur wears a neckerchief to conceal the scar on his neck that he received when he was guillotined. The scar is actually a fake.
• I Know What You Did Last Summer: It isn't exactly an injury, but something similar occurs after the fisherman stalking the main characters cuts off most of Helen The Fashionista's hair while she's sleeping. She spends the next scene wearing a bulky cap to hide the effects of her Traumatic Haircut.
• Bob from I Think I Do (1997) spends a few scenes wearing a neck brace to hide the hickey Brendan gave him, which would show that he cheated on Sterling.
• In The Karate Kid, Daniel puts on a pair of sunglasses to hide the black eye he got from his first fight with Johnny. His mom isn't fooled for a second and freaks out about it.
• In The Karate Kid (2010), like the original film, Andre Parker gets into a fight with one of the bullies at school, leaving him with a black eye. The next day, he wears some of his mother's makeup and a hat to school to try and avoid suspicion. It fails when the teacher mentions that hats aren't allowed in school; his mother takes off the hat, seeing that he's wearing makeup and realizes that he's been in a fight. She panics over this while Dre tells her it's nothing.
• Ladyhawke: Phillipe hides the injuries from Navarre mauling him in wolf form with his sweater.
• No Country for Old Men. Wounded and wearing a bloodstained shirt after a run-in with Anton Chigurh, Llewelyn Moss encounters three teenagers out drinking and pays $500 for the jacket one of them is wearing (and a beer). At the end of the movie, Chigurh pays a kid for his shirt as an improvised sling for a broken arm. The kid is willing to give it to him for free, but Chigurh insists he take the money in exchange for saying I Was Never Here.
• In Nothing but the Night, Mrs Van Traylen always wore long gloves to conceal scars she received in a fire years earlier.
• In Secret Beyond the Door..., Miss Robey wears a scarf at all times to hide the disfiguring facial scars she received recusing Mark from a fire as a child. Except she had plastic surgery to remove the scars during her last vacation. She keeps wearing the scarf because she fears the family's sympathy is the only reason she is keeping her job.
• In Shredder Orpheus, Scratch has a red, raw scar on her neck from when she tried to skate the EBN parking garage, using her scarf to cover it up most of the time. She reveals it to Orpheus as proof of how dangerous the garage is.
• Sisu: Schultze never removes his tanker's helmet except for one Hats Off to the Dead scene, and this may be because taking it off reveals some ugly third-degree burns on the side of his head and a missing ear.
• The Terminator: The first car chase between the Terminator and the protagonists leaves the Terminator with a severely damaged left eye. It cuts out the eye and most of the skin around the socket, and uses sunglasses to cover up the injury.
• In Terror in a Texas Town, The Gunslinger Johnny Crale wears Conspicuous Gloves to conceal the fact his right hand has been replaced by a metal prosthesis, forcing him to draw with his left hand.

Folklore

• One Urban Legend has a man marry a woman who always wears a scarf around her neck. Depending on the version, he either slips it off in her sleep or she finally gives him permission to remove it on her death bed, whereupon her head falls off. This either kills her or makes her very angry.

Jokes

• There's one joke where the captain of a ship always asks for his red jacket before a battle so that his crew wouldn't see him bleed and lose morale. When faced with a battle that he has no chance of winning, he instead asks for his brown pants.

Literature

• Chocoholic Mysteries: In Bear Burglary, Lee discovers that the girl her former stepson is helping has bruises on her arms, left by a guy she went out with once who's been harassing her ever since and covered up by her sweatshirt.
• The Daevabad Trilogy: In the second book, Prince Ali dresses to hide the fact that he's Covered in Scars from the neck down from a marid attack, which he only survived because he let the marid possess his body. He's so afraid of having to explain it that he even goes without changing or bathing for weeks—fortunately his mother, who is determined to protect him, figures it out.
• Eragon: After rescuing Arya from prison, Eragon and Murtagh attempt to move the comatose elf to a bed, but her sleeve gets caught in a branch and tears, revealing numerous cuts and bruises on her arm. Worried, they both start stripping her to check on her other wounds, and find her entire body has been beaten, whipped, branded, and scarred from long periods of Cold-Blooded Torture. Eragon is then forced to use his magic to heal her while uncomfortably noticing how attractive she is.
• Played With in Flawed. Flawed individuals are branded, and those brands are not allowed to be concealed via clothing or makeup, the only exception being on the foot hidden by shoes. Celestine gets into a lot of trouble when people mistake her sister for her and think she was trying to hide her brand with her hair. Despite this, she does still hide one brand with clothing- her illegal 6th brand on her spine, which she refuses to show off, and so she refuses to change for swim class and remove her clothing.
• Holmes on the Range: A dog-napper in "Curious Incidents" is partially exposed due to not taking off a pair of muddy gloves that he needs to hide a fresh dog bite.
• Shane Schofield of Ice Station wears sunglasses to hide his eyes, scarred from a torture session when he was captured — hence his Nom de Guerre, "Scarecrow".
• Late in I'm Ok (2018), Mickey McDonald comes to school with a bruise she tried covering up with make-up. She got the bruise from her mother as punishment for stealing money from her. Said money was actually stolen by Ok to be able to afford the tent he wanted.
• In the Kane Series story "Undertow", Kane's lover Dessylyn is usually seen wearing a wide collar of leather and silk with a large emerald set in it, which hides a scar left from the time when she hanged herself.
• The grey-faced soldiers in Monstrous Regiment, who march homewards with grim determination and hollow eyes, with their coats buttoned tight in the summer heat. The coats are the only thing acting as concealment and crude bandaging over "the unspeakable mess that lay beneath".
• The Murderbot Diaries. Murderbot prefers a long-sleeved shirt with collar to hide the data port on its neck and the weapon portals in its arms. Thanks to a friendly sentient spaceship who used an Auto Doc to modify Murderbot's body, this is enough to pass as a human with cybernetic augments. In Exit Strategy, GrayCris operatives are running a scan for people obscuring their faces with hats, scarves, tattoos, or hoodies. Murderbot just walks right past them with its hoodie down, having already rejected the idea of wearing these items for exactly that reason.
• In A Murder Is Announced, the reason why Miss Blacklock always wears either a string of pearls or a necklace of cameos is to conceal the operation scar that marked her as Charlotte rather than Letitia.
• Much Ado About Grubstake: Lockwood shaves Mickey, the liveryman, bald while he's passed out as an intimidation tactic, and the liveryman is very embarrassed about it and starts wearing a wide-brimmed hat to hide this.
• Number the Stars: Prior to the beginning of the book, Peter was shot in the arm by the Nazis when they raided a Resistance meeting that he and Lise were attending. They both made it out of the building, but the police ran over Lise in a car. Peter had to wear a thick coat to hide his bandaged arm (and a hat to hide his distinctive red hair) when he attended Lise's funeral to keep any of the policemen in attendance from recognizing him as one of the escaped Resistance members.
• In the Outlander series, after Fergus loses his hand, he usually wears a hook - but on an occasion where he has to attend a high society ball, he covers his injury with a glove.
• In the third The Queen's Thief book, Eugenides is wounded in the abdomen, but he's able to bunch his loose, flowing clothing around the wound in order to conceal how much he's bleeding. At the same time, he puts up not a stoic front, but a whining and childish one that prevents anyone from taking him seriously. It's not until he's able to lie down that everyone sees how much blood there was soaking into his clothes.
• Star Wars: The Living Force: Pirate Girl Zilastra rarely takes off her gloves due to having had her hands surgically remade after they were blown off by a thermal detonator that she set off to kill her first Jedi.
• Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs: Noelle hides the bruises she received from Loic underneath her clothes.
• The Wheel of Time: Mat Cauthon wears a scarf around his neck to hide the scar from his hanging, which occurred under highly unusual and unpleasant circumstances that he doesn't want people asking questions about.
• Where the Crawdads Sing: The day Kya's ma leaves the family, she wears a white scarf tied around her forehead, but the edges of a bruise left by Pa are still visible.
• Whodunit Mysteries: In one story, Parnacki investigates a robbery where the store owner and his assailant injured each other. He interviews the suspects and quickly zeroes in on the one man who's wearing a long-sleeved shirt on a hot summer day. He rolls up the man's sleeves and finds injuries from the struggle.

Live-Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer has characters occasionally do this, usually to cover up a vampire bite. In the fifth season premiere, Buffy uses a scarf to cover up where Dracula bit her the night before. Later in the season, Riley starts wearing turtlenecks and longer sleeves to cover up the fact that he's been going to a "vampire brothel" where humans pay to get bitten deliberately.
• CSI: NY:
  • In "Dancing with the Fishes," Lindsay encounters a woman who exploits this. She uses makeup to fake a black eye, then wears sunglasses to cover it up.
  • Justified and downplayed by Mac, whose battle scar from the 1983 Beruit Marine Barracks bombing is naturally covered by his shirt. When Stella sees it when he's being checked out by the paramedics after the explosion in "Charge of This Post," he merely comments, "Old injury."
  • In "Pot of Gold", Reed is shown to still be wearing a scarf to hide his neck injury inflicted by the Cabbie Killer two seasons earlier.
• Dead Man's Gun: In the last scene of "The Collector", a man who survived being scalped is very reluctant to remove his hat and expose his scar and missing hair.
• Doctor Who: In "The Invisible Enemy", the station manager, Lowe, is taken over by The Virus. As the infection manifests with a strange growth around the eyes, Lowe conceals his infection by donning a pair of blast goggles and telling people his eyes had been injured during the explosion, making him very sensitive to light.
• Father Brown:
  • The final piece of evidence Father Brown uses to identify the killer in "The Crimson Feather" is that one of the suspects has not removed their gloves since the body was discovered. When the gloves are removed, there is a deep cut on the murderer's palm from the shard of broken mirror they used to stab the victim.
  • In the episode "The Passing Bell", Inspector Mallory questions one of the suspects about her Conspicuous Gloves and becomes increasingly brusque as she hesitates to remove them. Then, he's horrified and apologetic after she shows him badly scarred hands and explains that her abusive husband deliberately burned her and that she needs to wear gloves to deal with the regular and painful sloughing off of skin.
  • In "The Scales of Justice", the killer wears gloves to conceal the thumbnail that was ripped off when she dragged the body across the lawn, until she can replace it with a fake nail. As Father Brown points, it could take up to six months for the real nail to regrow.
• Friends: While babysitting little Ben, Monica accidentally bangs his head against a wooden beam causing a bump to form on her nephew's head. Rachel comes up with the idea of covering it up with the hat from one of his teddy bears. When Ross comes home he immediately wonders why his son is suddenly wearing wet-weather gear and eventually discovers the bump when he goes to put the boy down for a nap.
• In the Good Luck Charlie episode "Boys Meet Girls", Gabe gets beat up by a girl bully twice and tries to hide the injuries in both instances. The first is when he hides his black eye with a green cap, and the second is when he hides his busted lip by zipping up his jacket. His older sister, Teddy, doesn't fall for either case.
• Homicide: Life on the Street: After surviving a bullet wound to the head, Bolander uses a hat to cover up his scars. In a Call-Back, Pembleton does the same things several seasons later to cover up his surgical scars following his stroke.
• Horatio Hornblower: In "Retribution", Archie Kennedy hides from everyone that he was shot in the fight aboard the Renown with their escaped Spanish prisoners. He tries to cover his wound with his uniform. When Horatio notices his blood, he insists that it's just a scratch. Horatio rips his uniform coat open and sees what's basically a Mortal Wound Reveal.
• Law & Order: UK's Matt Devlin offhandedly states "Baggy clothes hide a lot", referring to the way their adolescent victim was dressed, suspecting that he was a victim of child abuse —and heavily implying that he was too.
• Lou Grant: In "Housewarming", Dorothy Trent wears large sunglasses to hide the bruise on her right eye, given to her by her husband Jerry, when they go to Lou's housewarming party. She claims that she has an eye infection but Billie learns the truth when she accidentally walks in on her in the bathroom and sees the bruise.
• Murder, She Wrote:
  • In one episode, a waitress who flirts with a domestic abuser and makes a date with him is wearing dark sunglasses the next morning. It turns out that they're hiding a black eye.
  • In another episode, the killer stabs the victim in self-defense when he tries to choke her, and spends the rest of the episode (until she's exposed) wearing a scarf to hide the bruises.
• Red Dwarf: In "Stoke Me a Clipper", Ace Rimmer reveals that he is a hard-light hologram and has been hiding an energy leak coming from his damaged projector under his jacket.
• In the Roseanne episode "Crime and Punishment", Jackie, Roseanne's sister, is in an abusive relationship with her boyfriend Fisher. She tries the hide the bruises that he gave her with a long-sleeved shirt and a coat, but Roseanne eventually finds out.
• Sense8: Daniela goes back to her abusive ex-boyfriend to stop him from blackmailing Lito and Hernando with pictures of them having sex. When she meets up with them to hand over the phone containing the pictures she's wearing sunglasses even though it's the middle of the night. Hernando, sensing that something's wrong, pulls Dani's shades off to reveal a fresh black eye courtesy of the ex-boyfriend.
• The Spiderwick Chronicles (2024): Fencing instructor Valentina always wears gloves that hide how she lost her hands to magic and that they are wisps of smoke whenever she tries to do certain things with them.
• Supernatural: In the season 14 finale, Jack is brutally killed off and has his eyes explode. In the season 15 premiere, his body is used by the demon Belphegor, who adopts a pair of sunglasses to mask the Eye Scream.
• The Twilight Zone (1985): In "Acts of Terror", Louise Simonson tries and fails to hide the latest bruise inflicted by her abusive husband Jack using the top of her dress. When the mailman asks about it, she tells him that she walked into a door.

Music

• The Bowling for Soup song "99 Biker Friends" discusses how their female friend is being beaten by her husband. In addition to her wearing "seven pounds of makeup just to hide her beat-up face", the chorus mentions:
  She's wearing shades
  But we all see
  Behind the tinted glass
• The Dixie Chicks song "Goodbye Earl" has Wanda wearing dark glasses, long-sleeved blouses, and makeup to cover up the signs of her abuse by Earl.
• Carrie Underwood's "Church Bells" sees Jenny covering up the abuse of her rich husband in a similar manner.

Theatre

• In Cesare - Il Creatore che ha distrutto, when Angelo sees his friend Roberto stumbling, he wants to help, but the latter tells him to leave him alone. Roberto collapses, and Angelo sees that he was concealing a massive injury on his arm with his cape, an injury that shows that he's the culprit who started the fire.

Video Games

• Blaz Blue Centralfiction: Hazama was said to be grievously injured in the previous game, but he shows up fine here; it helps that his outfit covers most of his body. Then in one scene of the story mode, he opens his shirt, revealing that he has a hole torn in his chest where his heart should be.
• Alluded to in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords if you play a male Exile. Kreia, being the Dirty Old Woman she is, starts prodding Male Exile about whether Visas Marr is unscarred under her concealing robes or if her body bears the scars of slavery under Nihilus, and then starts speculating which one would "excite" him more.

Visual Novels

• There are various examples from the Ace Attorney series, where someone is revealed to be hiding an injury under their clothes, which provides more leads to solve the current murder case.
  • In the climax of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations, Phoenix figured out the real killer himself was attacked with a knife and therefore should have a wound on his body. However, at first glance, his suspect doesn't have any wounds. Not only that, he was still wearing the same clothes he wore during the murder, and they are still intact. Phoenix then realizes that the wound is under the killer's mask, a special prosthetic the killer always wears due to his damaged vision. At this point, the suspect finally admits defeat upon being unmasked as the real killer.
  • In "Turnabout Corner" from Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, Apollo notices the witness Alita Tiala's habit of pulling on her scarf as she testifies about her meeting with the victim, Pal Meraktis. Apollo points out that a table lamp with a bloodied cord was found at the victim's office, meaning that the meeting wasn't friendly. He asks Alita to remove her scarf, and sure enough, there is a red mark around her neck from when the victim used the lamp cord to choke her unconscious. Alita claims to be a victim in the whole matter, but Prosecutor Gavin points out Meraktis wouldn't leave the witness be after he strangled her. Indeed, Meraktis loaded the unconscious Alita on top of a ramen stand (It Makes Sense in Context) with the intent of dumping her body in a nearby river. However, Apollo's client, Wocky Kitaki, appeared to threaten Meraktis over the botched operation to remove a bullet in Wocky's body. Meraktis was about to confess when back in the stand, Alita regained consciousness and shot Meraktis before he could reveal Alita's role in the operation.
  • In "Turnabout Time Traveler" from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice, Phoenix was meeting with Sorin Sprocket, a witness and the husband-to-be of Phoenix's client, when suddenly Sorin fell over, bleeding from under his clothes, revealing that he has a stomach wound that has yet to be fully healed. As there was some unidentified blood that was just discovered at the crime scene earlier that day, Sorin becomes Phoenix's prime suspect. The victim had stabbed Sorin before abducting Ellen Wyatt, the client, with the intent of murdering Ellen. Sorin manages to catch up to them despite his wounds and managed to knock the victim out with a wedding prop. The incident was quickly covered up, but the victim's co-conspirator decided to kill the victim and frame Ellen for the murder, using the same wedding prop to do so.
  • In "Turnabout Ablaze", the final case of Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, Quercus Alba, the man suspected of leading an international smuggling ring, reveals a stab wound under his clothes, claiming he was attacked by a masked thief who came to burgle his office, justifying the thief's death at his hands. With Alba being an ambassador and the murder being within his country's embassy, this means the thief's murder will only be tried in Alba's country to his advantage. However, as it turns out, Alba actually got wounded while he murdered fellow ring member Manny Coachen for being The Starscream. Coachen had managed to stab him once before being killed. As this occurred outside of the embassy grounds, Alba is able to be arrested and tried locally, especially since his diplomatic immunity was just revoked moments before.
  • In "The Forgotten Turnabout" from Gyakuten Kenji 2, there is an inverted example of the victim having an unrelated burn mark on her hand that was visible when her body is discovered, but then it turns out she normally wears gloves to hide them. There was a taped recording of the murder, with the lone piece of dialogue determined to be the culprit mentioning the victim's burns. But when it was revealed the victim was actually wearing gloves during her murder, this meant the recording was actually the victim talking about the culprit's burn mark. A straight example of this trope follows as the culprit was exposed when it was determined he was hiding his burn under his fake beard.
• From the Danganronpa series:
  • Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: Towards the end of the game, it's revealed that the reason that Kyoko wears Conspicuous Gloves all of the time is to hide the fact that her hands were badly burned during a case early in her detective career.
  • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: At the start of the third chapter, Fuyuhiko apologizes to the other students for his part in the previous chapter's murder. What they don't know (until he starts bleeding everywhere), is that under his clothes, he's already slashed open his stomach as an act of penance fitting of a Yakuza leader. He ultimately survives, however.

Web Animation

• Inanimate Insanity Invitational: After Bow pulls out a computer chip from her head, she's left with a gash where she reached into, which she tries to hide by wearing a sun hat.
• RWBY: From Volume 4, Cinder starts wearing an unusually long, asymmetrical dress that completely hides her left arm; she also takes to wearing an eyepatch that heavily hints at her having taken extensive injuries at the end of Volume 3. The sleeve conceals the fact she lost her left arm, which has now been replaced by a Grimm arm. The one time a person spotted the Grimm arm, they collapsed in horror — allowing Cinder to kill them and steal their clothing to disguise her identity; she wears bandages to hide the arm. When she adopts new clothing for the Atlas Arc, she drapes a cape over her left side to conceal the Grimm arm. Volume 8 reveals that her preference for wearing chokers and high collars hides neck scarring that was caused while being tortured as a child.

Web Comics

• Kill Six Billion Demons: The friendly old "Auntie Maya" usually wears voluminous robes and styles her hair to hide extensive burns and scarring. Unknown to her traveling companions, she used to be a God-Emperor and Master Swordsman in the Universal War.
• Quite a few in SWAP Ensemble:
  • Patrick wears a very rigid jacket to hide the extent of his malnourishment.
  • Turie wears his dark Glasses for some time after he gets a black eye, courtesy of Trudy.
  • A non-injury variant; Vincent wears a hood to hide his Traumatic Haircut; he later borrows Paris's hat, which is less concealing.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Fight", Gumball gets a black eye from a fight with Tina Rex and tries to hide it with sunglasses. His mom isn't fooled, and when he states that he ran into a door (which is technically true, but it only happened because Tina was chasing him), Anais tells her that he's getting bullied. Nicole is furious when she hears this.
• American Dad!: Parodied when Roger accidentally hits Francine in the face. Not wanting Stan to find out, he gives her a concealer that's specifically marketed to battered women trying to cover up their bruises.
• At the very start of the episode "Meltdown" of Batman Beyond, Powers is in a very late night meeting with another company he is offering to buy out but will withdraw the offer if they leave the room, using the ridiculous hour as a negotiating tactic. While the other side discusses, he takes a call from what turns out to be Terry as Batman, who is just calling him to taunt and piss off Powers after he busted one of his underling's schemes. Powers is indeed enraged, causing his radiation powers to burn high enough to form glowing cracks radiating from his eyes and threatening to expose his identity as the supervillain Blight. He hurriedly puts on a pair of sunglasses to hide the evidence and ends the meeting before leaving to get new artificial skin made.
• In "Going Overboard", the first episode of The Casagrandes, Carlos injures his leg when he tries to teach Ronnie Anne some of his old skateboard tricks. Because Carlos promised Frida he wouldn't skateboard again after they had children, Ronnie Anne helps him hide his cast with bear-skin boots from Carlota's closet.
• Family Guy: In "Screams of Silence: The Story of Brenda Q", Quagmire's sister Brenda wears a pair of sunglasses when she meets with Lois at a restaurant. She reluctantly takes them off to reveal that she received a black eye from her jerkass boyfriend Jeff.
• In an episode of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, a kid at Fat Albert's school always wears long sleeves. When a sleeve accidentally rides up, Fat Albert and the gang discover that it is concealing bruises from domestic abuse.
• In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Blackened Sponge", SpongeBob gets a black eye from being hit with a wrench when he tries to use it to open a tube of toothpaste, so he covers it up with glasses. It doesn't last long, as Patrick removes them and he is shocked to see that his friend is hurt. Not wanting to reveal the real reason he got injured, SpongBob claims that he got in a fight with a guy named Jack M. Crazyfish.
• A Thousand and One... Americas: At the start of the eleventh episode, Chris discovers his brother painting his face with the lipstick of their mother, making him look like an Incan. He does this because he got a swelling in the left eye due to an injury and wants to make it look like it's part of the tribal disguise. Surprisingly, it works, because Chris doesn't realize the truth.
• TRON: Uprising has a variant, as Programs don't use clothing in the same way as humans. Tron uses a masking subroutine to appear normal, but he deactivates it in front of Beck in the episode "Scars" to reveal the sheer amount of dead pixels and other damage Dyson's Cold-Powered Torture left behind.

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