Now I won't spell out actual "pointer tricks" but try to give some context in which these tricks might naturally be used:

I think that data structures like trees are a nice thing to continue once the fundamental properties of pointers have been discussed. (pointer to left, right and data...).

Then sketch out the operations necessary to insert elements, and then explain how pivoting the tree makes it stay performant. This gives you a lot of opportunity to use pointers-to-pointers and so on.

It's a thing that can be nicely visualized on a whiteboard, and it has relevance for students to understand things like databases or filesystems.

If you care to elaborate, you could continue explaining the pitfalls of multithreading, or locking all or parts of the tree during updates, making updates visible in a atomic way... but that gets's out of your "not too simple/crazy" limit pretty fast.

You could also make up a nice producer/consumer example where parts of data that has to be processed is passed around by pointers, stored in linked lists, sliced up/combined. Processing images (rotating tiles), or drawing fractals in parts of memory pointed to by some variable comes to mind.