Bruce Chatwin wrote that in Niger in 1971. The lines were published posthumously in 1993 in the book Photographs and Notebooks. It's only 8 words but it says so much. It reminds me of the more famous six word sentence by Hemingway.
He avoids calling them callouses a charge word with a lot of connotations that are no longer there. Their presence indicates his hard living and manual labor. The mosquitoes are plural, not singular. he's out-numbered, and that he passively lets them bite indicates either patience, indifference or masochism.
It's what I'd expect from the author of In Patagonia.
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