Black linework sketch of an apple with a worm, a stack of books, a pencil and a leaf, drawn as a tattoo design on tracing paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Apple, worm, book and pencil design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of an apple with a worm curling out of a bite, set in front of a stack of books, an upright pencil and a leaf. The linework is bold and even, with no shading or fill, and the design is drawn on a pale sheet with the subject filling most of the frame.

Traditional Apple Book Pencil Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The worm had been in the apple before I ever got my hands on it, and Mr Pryce swore he had nothing to do with it. He said so every Thursday, rattling the chalk tin, while the rain drummed on the window of the old grammar school annexe in Wigan. I was nine and I believed him, mostly because the worm looked so pleased with itself, poking out of that neat bite like it had been invited to a party.

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We kept the apple on the windowsill beside the books nobody borrowed. Pryce said it was for the lesson on patience. Every week it went a little softer and a little browner, and every week the worm grew a little longer, curling over the edge of the desk as if it were reading along. I started a tally on the back of my exercise book, a row of tiny pencil strokes for each day it was still there, and by the end of term the tally ran off the page.

On the last afternoon the caretaker came in with a bin bag and a face like a wet Sunday. He lifted the apple and it simply came apart in his hand, and out dropped the worm, fat and unbothered, wriggling toward the radiator. Pryce looked at me over his spectacles and sharpened his pencil to a needle. I have still got that pencil. The tally, I suspect, is still in a box in my mother's loft, and I never did learn which of us was the lesson.