Pictures

Two different things live in this section, and it is worth knowing which one you are looking at. Bite photographs — 39 frames of the mark on the skin — cover the seven bites people most often try to identify from a picture. Species photographs — 28 frames — show the animal that causes the bite. Every frame in both is freely licensed, with the photographer, the licence and the source file named beneath it.

Pictures of bites

• Spider bite pictures Real spider bites, and why most marks blamed on spiders are something else entirely.
• Bed bug bite pictures The bites, the bug feeding, and the fecal staining that settles it when the bites cannot.
• Tick bite pictures The bull’s-eye, the plain red patch that is just as much Lyme disease, and the black scab that is not.
• Mosquito bite pictures From one ordinary welt to a swelling wider than a palm, and the difference between a large reaction and an infected one.
• Flea bite pictures Small spots low on the leg, and the two things image searches show under this name that are not flea bites at all.
• Chigger bite pictures A band of bites along the sock line and waistband, and why the mite has gone by the time you start itching.
• Brown recluse bite pictures One bite followed day by day to a scar at twelve weeks, where the spider actually lives, and why most wounds blamed on it are a staph infection.

Pictures of the insects

• Identify a bug bite by picture The gallery of 28 species, what a photograph can and cannot settle, and how to take one worth comparing.

What is not here: a photograph for every bite. We publish a bite photograph only where a freely licensed one exists and we could verify the licence at the file itself. For everything else the mark is described in words, from the same data the rest of this site runs on — a wrong photograph is worse than none.