Bold black trident tattoo running down the centre of a person's bare back, with a smaller dark design on the right shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Trident tattoo down the back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A person with blue hair sits on a white chair with their back to the camera, showing a large black trident running from the upper back down the spine. A smaller dark design is visible on the right shoulder and upper arm. The ink is solid black with clean, heavy linework, set against pale skin and a bright window with a balcony railing on the left.

Blackwork Back Shoulder Trident Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spear had split at the shank the same week the harbour master ordered new chain, and Dad said we would have to mend it ourselves. "Go up to Gully's forge," he said, "and don't let him talk you into copper." So I walked the harbour wall at low tide with the broken trident over my shoulder, its three tines catching the light like something left out to dry.

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Old Gully Pardoe kept his forge behind the chandlery, where the tar smell had got into the bricks. He turned the spear over, tapped each tine with a hammer, and listened the way my nan listened to a kettle. "Iron that's been in salt water forty years wants asking nicely," he said. He heated the shank until it glowed the colour of a fox, then hammered the split closed while I held the tongs and tried not to breathe in the smoke.

It took the whole afternoon. When the light went orange through the forge door, he dunked the spear in the trough and it hissed like a cat. He hung it on two nails above the bench and stood back with his arms folded. "There. A proper fork again. Take it home before someone asks what it's for."

I walked back along the wall with the spear on my shoulder. The gulls wheeled over the mooring buoys, and I thought about how Dad always said a trident was for catching things that did not want catching. At the top of the slipway I stopped, because I saw that the three points were aimed at the whole town, and that I was the one holding them.