Black and grey tattoo of a muscular, bearded sea god holding a trident, with a water-tail base, on the upper arm.

Trident-bearing sea god on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bearded, muscular male figure holds a three-pronged trident over his right shoulder, with his body fading into churning water at the base. The linework is soft and the shading is detailed, with smooth grey gradients on skin, hair and water. The design is in black and grey only and fills most of the upper arm, with a tapering trident extending toward the top of the frame.

Realism Upper arm Trident Water Wave Beard

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The nets came up light again on the third morning after the storm, and you knew before the boom swung round that the old man would blame you for it. He had always blamed the sea for what the sea took, and now he had found someone with a face to spit at.

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You walk down to the mole at dusk, where the stone is slick with weed and the tide slaps the steps like a clerk stamping papers. Your father left you the boat, the debt, and a rule that no one speaks to the water after dark. You break it anyway. You tell the black swell that you owe it one sardine boat and a sack of barley, and that you will pay in whatever coin it wants.

Nothing answers at first. Then the surface lifts in a long grey hump, shouldering toward the steps, and a shape stands up out of it: a bearded man with shoulders like a ploughed field, water pouring from his hips back into the harbour as though he were the harbour itself. He raises the trident over his shoulder without hurry, and its three points catch the last of the light.

"You want the nets full," he says, in a voice like shingle dragged back down a beach. "Then you will give me what you kept back."

You have kept nothing but your father's knife, so you hold it out handle first. He turns it over, studies you for a long moment, and lets it drop into the churn. By morning the nets come up heavy with silver, and the old man sleeps all day without asking where the knife went.