Vintage 1994 Maryland Terps Temporary Tattoos 🐢 College ACC Terrapins Memorabilia!

Remember Maryland Terps Temporary Tattoos? The Terrapin You Wear on Game Day

Size: 5 1/2" x 4 1/2"

At the University of Maryland, luck has a shape: a grinning diamondback terrapin. Students rub the nose of the bronze Testudo statue before finals, and in the stands fans wore the terrapin on their cheeks. This is the game-day version, a sealed Imposters card of University of Maryland Terrapins temporary tattoos from 1994, never opened and never used.

Put one on for the next tailgate and you are back at Byrd Stadium in the mid-90s, in the red, white, black and gold.

What Is on the Card

• Package size: 5 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches
• Brand: Imposters, in red script with a small TM mark, above the words TEMPORARY TATTOOS
• The card's promises: Easy to Apply, Easy to Remove, Safe & Non-toxic, Waterproof, Lasts for Days
• Content: One Tattoo Sheet
• Designs: four laughing terrapins climbing over a red block M, and four red "Terps" scripts
• UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND printed up the left edge of the sheet, and NC 52 in the lower corner
• Header photo: a young couple, each wearing a "#1" tattoo on the cheek
• Condition: unopened and unused in its original clear bag

Look closely and the "Terps" scripts read backward, each with a small reversed TM beside it. That is how a transfer tattoo is printed: pressed face down onto the skin, the word comes out the right way round.

How Maryland Became the Terrapins

Maryland's teams were once known as the Old Liners. In 1932 Harry Clifton "Curley" Byrd, the football coach who went on to serve as the university's president from 1936, pushed for the diamondback terrapin as the school mascot. Byrd was a native of the Eastern Shore, from Crisfield, Maryland, where the Chesapeake Bay terrapins were plentiful.

The Class of 1933 gave the campus a bronze terrapin as its class gift. A live diamondback sent by Holland Sea Food Company of Crisfield served as the model, and sculptor Aristide Cianfarani made the statue at Gorham Manufacturing Co. in Rhode Island. It was unveiled at Ritchie Coliseum in 1933. The model turtle died shortly after the unveiling.

The Legend of the Turtle That Kept Getting Stolen

The story every Terp hears is that Testudo was stolen 12 times in 15 years. In 1947 Johns Hopkins students carried the statue off to Baltimore. Maryland students went after it and laid siege to the house where it was hidden, and more than 200 city police answered the call. The university eventually filled the turtle with hundreds of pounds of concrete and fastened it to its pedestal, and in 1965 moved it in front of McKeldin Library, where Testudo stands today.

The tradition grew from there. Since the 1990s, students have rubbed Testudo's nose for good luck at finals and left offerings at his feet in the hope of good grades: coins, notes and flowers at first, and later traffic cones, road signs and even furniture. In 2013 the pile of offerings actually caught fire from a lit candle. Over at the football stadium there's another Testudo, and the team touches it for luck on the way out before every game.

1994: The Year the Terrapin Became Law

In 1994 the Maryland General Assembly named the diamondback terrapin the official state reptile and the legally codified mascot of the University of Maryland, putting into law a bond that had run since Byrd's day.

Byrd Stadium, Renamed

The football stadium opened in 1950 and carried Byrd's name. Byrd transformed the old agricultural college into a modern university, and he was also a committed segregationist. In December 2015 the University System of Maryland Board of Regents voted 12-5 to rename it Maryland Stadium, after President Wallace Loh called the old name a painful reminder to African Americans that a generation earlier they had been unwelcome on the campus.

From the ACC to the Big Ten

In 1994 the Terrapins played in the Atlantic Coast Conference, which Maryland helped found on May 8, 1953, when it and six other schools split from the Southern Conference. The Board of Regents voted on November 19, 2012 to leave, and Maryland became a Big Ten school on July 1, 2014. Its official colors, red, white, black and gold, come from the Maryland state flag, and Maryland is the only NCAA school with four official colors.

Temporary Tattoos, Then and Now

Temporary tattoos began as candy and gum prizes printed in food coloring and moved onto the skin with a little water. The modern method, printing the image on a translucent film that transfers to the body, was developed by Keith R. Relyea and Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, the 3M Company, under a patent filed April 9, 1984 and granted June 10, 1986. By the time this Terps card was on the rack, a fan could buy a whole sheet of team logos in one sealed packet.

🐢 About these

The supply is finite in the plainest way - there's just this one sealed card, and once it's gone, it'll be very difficult to acquire. It's been kept in the dark, climate controlled at 72°F and under 40% humidity, like everything else I have.