I was out installing a deadbolt today when I reached into my front shirt pocket and was startled by a sharp pain in my finger. At first I wondered if I’d been stung by a hornet. I drew my hand out to figure out what had happened. The culprit was no hornet, though; some idiot had left a fresh razor blade in that pocket.

I surveyed the tip of my right index finger. I had sliced it rather badly but it wasn’t bleeding yet. I was reminded of something familiar but I couldn’t quite find the thought. My mind groped for it and then, ah!, there it was–that moment of reflection that a toddler experiences right after he hurts himself and right before he releases a torrent of shrieks. My finger was reflecting. And, sure enough, in the next moment the blood started to come. I did what any normal adult man would: I stuck the greasy dirty bleeding fingertip into my mouth.

This was all a little embarrassing because I’d been having a conversation with my customer before it started, and the cut completely pulled my focus away. When I looked up she was saying something about a first-aid kit and scurrying out of the kitchen. She came back just seconds later, Band-Aid in hand. She asked if I needed her to put it on for me. What followed was a slight pause and then a chuckle from both of us. She had just gotten home with her three kids and was in full-on mother mode, making snacks and helping with homework. I bandaged my own wound.

My biggest concern at the moment the blood appeared was not the pain. The pain became irrelevant as soon as I saw the first red droplet. This is always the case when I begin to bleed at work. The focus immediately shifts from my discomfort to stain avoidance. I don’t want to mark up people’s white doors and freshly painted walls. I also make some efforts to hide the blood from any customers that may be around. People tend not to enjoy seeing their skilled tradesmen bleed. Plus, my injury is evidence of a mistake — a moment of clumsiness or, as in this case, poor judgment.

When I worked in an office I’d occasionally get what I liked to call white-collar war wounds: a deep papercut; a pinched pinky from changing the jug in the water cooler; a burn on the wrist while ironing my shirt in the morning. None of that could even compare to the nonstop abuse that my hands receive from working with tools on a daily basis. On any given day I have one wound fresh, one healing, and several in various stages of fading.

This is not to speak of the dirt. Lock work is dirty. The internal workings are greased up in production and that grease spends years attracting and accumulating dirt until I expose it and it can work its way into the cracks of my hands. The dirtier my hands get, the more I want to wash them. And the more I wash my hands, the more I dry them out, thus deepening the crevices into which the the dirt can work itself. This is a large part of why I don’t like doing automotive work. Working on cars is a filthy process; sometimes it seems I only have to look at a car door lock to cover my hands in gray soot.

But I can tolerate the injuries. I’m not concerned that my hands have become an abstract timeline of my many little mistakes. The scars are clear evidence of work, and there’s no shame in work.