Bareskin

A bare-skin boy did guide my feet— A boy with pretty, pouting ways: And oh, ’twas shrewd deceit!

1931, Hugh Walpole, Judith Paris, London: Macmillan, Part 2, “The Clipping,” p. 356, He sat there thinking of his youth, of fighting a man bare-skin in White haven and throttling him […]

1940, W. H. D. Rouse (translator), Nonnos Dionysiaca, Cambridge: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, Nonnos XVI, p. 3, Then Dionysos saw the girl swimming in the water bareskin, and his mind was shaken with sweet madness by the fiery shaft [shot by Eros].

His fez sits on the little table with the stacks of Xeroxed parts, and thus is exposed the jagged bareskin patch, shaped like Antarctica, amid the tightscrolled turf that covers his skull.

1911, Mrs. Todd Lunsford, “As the Twig is Bent,” Kindergarten Journal, Chicago Kindergarten College Alumnae Association, Volume 6, No. 4, p. 141, After your babe’s next bath, put him freely on the bed still in his birthday clothes […] I happen to know one mother who has made daily practice of this bareskin play with her youngest child.

1942, “Campus Caravan,” The George Washington University Hatchet, Volume 39, No. 14, 15 December, 1942, p. 2, […] the WAAC, A.W.O.L. from Ft. Des Moines, who was found doing a bareskin act in a local burlesque, was a misguided miss who had taken these Navy “Strip for Action” posters too seriously.

She believed herself to be free of morbid modesty—she recalled suddenly that she had gone on her first bareskin swimming party at fifteen.