It is being stored as an int. The problem is that inet_ntoa takes a 4 character string as an argument. You need to do something like:

$var=chr(0x0a).chr(0x0a).chr(0x0a).chr(0x01);
# OR
$var=v10.10.10.1;  #using the v-string notation if your perl is new en
+ough
# OR
$var=pack "CCCC", 10, 10, 10, 1;
# OR (probably best yet)
$var=inet_aton 0x0a0a0a01;
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To get the proper string format to feed to inet_ntoa