Blood — Tag Meaning
A broad freeform tag noting that blood appears on the page, whether from combat, accidents, medical scenes, or supernatural elements like vampirism. It is one of the most general injury-adjacent tags on the archive and spans every rating.
What to Expect From "Blood" Fics
Bleeding is described but the tag alone does not indicate severity; pair your filtering with Blood and Gore if intensity matters to you.
How to find Blood fics on AO3
On AO3, click any tag to see every work that uses it, then refine with the "Filters" sidebar — combine it with your fandom or ship, set a rating, or exclude tags you don't want. See our AO3 filtering guide for the full walkthrough.
Browse "Blood" works on AO3Popular Fics Tagged "Blood"
Real examples from AO3's most-kudosed works:
Sweet Quiznak
by CheckeredCloth
My Last Thoughts are of You
by SKayLanphear
What a Healing Pod Can't Repair
by Remember_Me
A Case of the Mondays
by SkiLift
Medium Rare
by MargaretKire
invincible
by bonnia
Related Tags
Blood and Injury
The canonical AO3 pairing of blood with bodily harm, used when injuries are depicted with some vividness rather than mentioned in passing. It functions as a mid-level warning — more graphic than a scraped knee, less than gore — common in action, whump, and battle fic.
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Blood and Gore
The canonical tag for explicitly visceral content: heavy bleeding, exposed wounds, and graphic bodily damage described in detail. It frequently accompanies the Graphic Depictions Of Violence archive warning and horror-leaning works.
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Injury
A straightforward content tag flagging that a character gets physically hurt. It covers everything from sprained ankles to battlefield wounds, and authors typically add it for reader awareness even when the injury is brief, since some readers seek out injury fic and others avoid it.
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Violence
A general-purpose flag for violent content that exceeds the incidental but may not warrant the archive's Graphic Depictions warning. Authors use it to cover fights, assaults, and brutality, trusting readers to combine it with the fic's rating to judge intensity.
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