Black ink tattoo on a forearm showing a cheese grater with an onion slice, an apple, leaves and partial script beneath.

Grater and produce on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo on the inner forearm shows a cheese grater at centre, with a sliced onion to the left, an apple to the right and a cluster of leaves above. A dotted line outlines the grater and a bracket sits below it, with partial script running along the bottom edge that is cut off by the frame. The linework is bold and clean, the image is in black and grey only, and the composition is centred on the grater.

Forearm Apple Leaves Script Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in the Tollgate Road flat had cleaned the grater properly in years, and Maud, who had inherited it along with the lease, said that was why it sang when you pressed it. Her nephew Tomas came up the stairs at six with a carrier bag of windfall apples and a face like a shut door, and she knew from the bag alone that his week had gone badly.

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"You've made me cry again," he said, dropping the bag on the table. The onion on the board was already half gone, its layers curling like old paper.

"The onion did that, not me," Maud said. "Onions are honest. They make you weep before you've tasted a thing." She showed him how to hold the apple against the ridges so the flesh fell in pale snow onto the chopping board, and she left the leaves from the cutting she'd rooted in a jam jar to stir in the draught from the window. Tomas grated faster than he should have, and the grater bit into his knuckle. Maud wrapped the hand in a tea towel without a word, took the apple from him, and finished the rest herself, saying the grater always takes what it is owed.

They ate the apple on toast with salt and a little sugar, sitting on the step where the light came in low through the back yard. Above the cooker, someone long gone had chalked a slate with the words that had faded to a ghost of a sentence, and Maud had never bothered to finish reading it, because she knew how it went.

When they had finished, she rinsed the grater under the cold tap, shook it dry, and hung it back on its nail to wait for the next apple.