With love for Tom, a granddaughter matches a mark

Jenna Garcia’s right arm is a garden of flowers. All of her favorite kinds are there, inked in black from wrist to shoulder. Set among them, a little below her elbow, are three block letters: TOM.

Thomas Reed, Jenna’s grandfather, has the same tattoo in the same spot on his arm, though his has been faded by time.

Jenna’s tattoo is a tribute. Growing up, the story told among her family was that Tom got the original tattoo during the time he spent working as a logger in his youth. Like today, logging was one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, and it was common back then for loggers to tattoo their names on themselves in case a catastrophe left them unrecognizable.

That grim practicality is not what Jenna thinks about when she looks at her arm. She thinks about the man, her grandpa, one of the best people she’s known.

“Oh, he’s my favorite,” she gushes. “The best husband, the best father, the best grandfather and great grandfather.”

Tom was born in northern Idaho in 1937. His parents were homesteaders who raised five children in the small forest town of Kooskia. For years, Tom’s father worked for Potlatch Lumber, which had a mill in Lewiston. In a testament to the occupation’s hazards, Tom’s father died in a logging accident when Tom was a young man.

It didn’t keep Tom from the job. He was a logger for a stretch after high school before taking up his life’s work as a barber. He married his wife Betty in 1958. She was a beautician, and for years they ran their own shop at their home in Nezperce. They raised three daughters, including Jenna’s mother, before retiring to a Kooskia cabin that Tom spent eight years building himself.

The grandpa Jenna knows is always in a ball cap and a t-shirt with some kind of joke on it, and he’s never in a bad mood. “It’s like he’s just very happy to be here,” says Jenna, who works in IT and settled in Kuna after growing up in Moscow and Meridian. She and her husband TJ have six kids.

Jenna offers an anecdote to explain Tom’s quiet, consummate goodness: He was setting out plastic chairs for a family gathering once. There were two left for him and Jenna’s grandmother, and he gave her the better, more comfortable one with the high back. Jenna sees such simple sweetness in her grandpa all the time.

*Tom on his porch in Kooskia. Photo courtesy of Jenna Garcia.*

Now in his late 80s, Tom will still cut your hair if you ask. He still drives his tractor and chops firewood for the cabin’s wood burning stove.

Jenna remembers seeing the tattoo on his arm as she grew up. She got hers in 2023, though she’d wanted it long before that. It was done by local artist Graham Jackson, who has done several of her tattoos, including the sleeve of flowers that surround TOM. A cousin of Jenna’s in Nampa has the TOM tattoo, too.

Jenna recently asked her grandparents about how her grandpa’s tattoo was done. She learned that he did it himself while he was in high school, a little bit before his time as a logger, with an ink pen and needle. It’s not quite the story that Jenna had always heard about the tattoo, but she says that doesn’t matter to her. She chalks it up to the way a family’s lore often changes in its details over time.

“It’s still my grandpa’s tattoo,” she says. “I have it because of him, because I’m so thankful he’s my grandpa.”

Jenna

Jesse