Vintage 1997 Minnesota Vikings NFL Fingernail Tattoos 🏈 Sealed Sheet Superbowl Football Fan Gift NFL Properties Licensed Novelty

Fingernail Tattoos for Vikings Fans? 🏈 Vintage 1997 Minnesota Vikings NFL Sealed Sheet

Size: 2 1/2" x 2 1/2"

🏈 What's In the Pack

There was a particular kind of joy in the 1990s that doesn't quite exist the same way anymore — the joy of a five-and-dime novelty rack, a gift shop spinner display, or a stadium concourse table stacked with little cellophane packets promising something fun for a few coins. Long before phone cases and jersey-print leggings, this is how a kid (or a grown adult who refused to grow up on Sundays) showed team spirit down to the very tips of their fingers. The package measures a compact 2 1/2" x 2 1/2" (approximately 6.4 x 6.4 cm) — small enough to fit in a palm, exactly the size it needed to be for a gift shop impulse buy or a stocking stuffer at a Vikings tailgate.

This is an unused pack of Minnesota Vikings NFL Fingernail Tattoos, distributed by Play-By-Play Toys & Novelties of San Antonio, Texas, and made in Taiwan — every tattoo is still on the sheet, never applied. The tattoo panel carries the printed copyright "© 1997 NFL Properties, Inc. All rights reserved." That's the NFL's own licensing company, set up by the league in 1963 and run out of New York City. So this one little pack brings together a San Antonio distributor, a New York copyright and a sheet made in Taiwan, all built around a Minnesota Norseman. I love that about it. Up top, the star-spangled NFL shield sits over a painted stadium field, yellow goalposts and little pennants flying over the stands, with the pitch listed in plain black type — Easy to apply, Easy to remove, Waterproof, Lasts for days, Safe & non-toxic — and FINGERNAIL TATTOOS stamped across the turf in bold yellow, with "Not recommended for children under 3 years of age" and MADE IN TAIWAN printed beside it.

Neither "Vikings" nor "Minnesota" is printed anywhere — the Norseman head does all the talking. Ten gold-and-purple horned Viking heads sit on the tan sheet, printed mirror-reversed so the image reads correctly once it's pressed on: these are water-slide transfers, applied tattoo-side-down, which is exactly why the printing looks flipped on the sheet itself. Eight little ones run in two rows of four, with two bigger ones set out to either side between the rows, and every one is the full Norseman: long gold braid, big moustache, bushy brow, and the helmet with its two white horns. Flip the pack over and the back walks through the four-step application and removal in little red-line drawings — remove the sheet, press it down tattoo-side-down, wet the paper, peel and rinse. The example tattoo in those drawings is, oddly, a Pittsburgh Steelers logo — Play-By-Play clearly ran one generic instruction back across every team in the line. At the bottom it reads "DISTRIBUTED BY Play-By-Play TOYS & NOVELTIES, SAN ANTONIO, TX 78218-0267." Collectors say Play-By-Play only made these for about a dozen NFL teams, which makes chasing a full team run half the fun.

⚔️ The Norseman, and the 1997 Season

That horned profile has been the Vikings' primary logo since the franchise joined the NFL as an expansion team in 1961 — drawn by newspaper cartoonist Karl Hubenthal on behalf of general manager Bert Rose and head coach Norm Van Brocklin. This exact version, with the purple lightened and the gold darkened, was introduced for the 1997 season and stayed in use through 2001 — so the tattoo on this sheet is the Norseman exactly as the Vikings wore him in 1997, the year printed right on it. He was still the team's logo the very next fall, when the Vikings went 15-1 and a rookie out of Marshall named Randy Moss caught 17 touchdown passes, the most ever by an NFL rookie.

On the field, 1997 was Dennis Green's sixth season as head coach, with the Vikings playing out of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. They opened 8-2, then dropped five straight before winning the finale to sneak into the playoffs as the sixth seed. In the Wild Card game at the Giants, Minnesota trailed 22-13 with 90 seconds left and won 23-22 — their first playoff win since 1988 — before losing 38-22 at San Francisco in the divisional round, and finishing the year 9-7, fourth in a tough NFC Central. John Randle led the NFL with 15.5 sacks that year, Cris Carter's 13 touchdown catches led the league, and Randall Cunningham had just been signed back after a year out of football. And don't forget Jake Reed on the other side from Carter: he actually led the team with 1,138 receiving yards. Warren Moon, who'd quarterbacked the Vikings the three years before, was gone by then; the starting job went to Brad Johnson, Moon wouldn't take a pay cut to back him up, and he signed with Seattle. In Week 7 against Carolina, quarterback Brad Johnson threw a touchdown pass to himself — the first time that had ever happened in NFL history. Four Vikings made the Pro Bowl: Cris Carter, Randall McDaniel, John Randle, and Todd Steussie.

🏟️ From the Met to the Dome

The name came first. When Minnesota was granted its NFL franchise in 1960, general manager Bert Rose recommended "Vikings" — a name meant to stand for an aggressive team with the will to win and, at the same time, to pay tribute to Minnesota's large population of Scandinavian descent. Old-time Vikings fans will tell you the Norseman has gone through subtle tweaks over the decades — a sharper jaw here, a cleaner horn line there — but the core identity, that proud Scandinavian warrior look tied to the state's deep Nordic settlement heritage, has never left.

The Vikings played their first two decades outdoors at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, in weather that became as much a part of team identity as the horned helmet itself — frozen breath, frozen fingers, and a home-field advantage built on misery for the visitors. Long before this sheet was printed, the Vikings had already built a defensive legend of their own: the "Purple People Eaters" front four of the late 1960s and '70s — Alan Page, Carl Eller, Jim Marshall, and Gary Larsen — a defensive line so feared it earned its own nickname, with quarterback Fran Tarkenton running the offense, and four trips to the Super Bowl (IV, VIII, IX and XI).

In 1982 the team moved indoors to the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis, trading the tundra for a roaring, echoing dome famous for how loud it got — fans and visiting players alike talked about the crowd noise as a weapon. The Metrodome was also where the Twins' "Homer Hankie" took off in 1987, and Vikings crowds there sang "Skol, Vikings," the team's fight song since 1961, Skol being the old Scandinavian toast. By the time this sheet was printed, purple-and-gold Sundays under the dome were the whole state's ritual.

📺 The '90s Licensing Boom

The 1990s were the golden age of the NFL as a merchandising machine. This was the decade the NFL, NBA, and MLB all discovered — in a very big way — that licensing wasn't just about jerseys and ball caps anymore. Toy and novelty companies like Play-By-Play built their businesses on turning big licenses — sports leagues, cartoon studios, Hollywood franchises — into small, affordable items that kids could actually buy with allowance money: plush mascots, keychains, stickers, and little packs like this one. A Texas company distributing Minnesota Vikings gear made in Taiwan and stamped with a New York-based league's copyright is a perfect little snapshot of how national the sports merchandise machine had become by the late '90s. The instruction drawings even use a rival franchise's logo — the Pittsburgh Steelers' familiar Steelmark — purely as the generic how-to illustration, a small detail that shows this Vikings pack was one piece of a much larger multi-team production run.

🎪 Play-By-Play Toys & Novelties, San Antonio

Play-By-Play was founded in San Antonio in 1986 by Arturo Torres, who started the company as a vending-machine prize supplier and took it public in 1995. In June 1996 it bought Ace Novelty for about $44 million, which by its own filings made it the leading supplier of stuffed toys and novelties to the U.S. amusement trade — theme parks, arcades, carnivals, state fairs. It all ran out of a warehouse at 4400 Tejasco Street in San Antonio, the same 78218 ZIP printed on the back of this pack. Play-By-Play was delisted from Nasdaq in May 2001 and Torres resigned as chairman that June; the company's European arm carried the name forward from Valencia, Spain, and was bought by the Spanish toy maker Famosa in 2006.

🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🏈 Frame the unopened pack in a small shadow box with a Vikings ticket stub or pennant from the 1990s
• 📦 Add it to a Vikings memorabilia shelf next to a bobblehead, a program or a Metrodome-era photo
• 🎁 Tuck it into a gift for the Vikings fan who remembers the Metrodome — or Randy Moss's rookie year
• 📌 Pin it up on a game-room or man-cave wall with other '90s NFL novelties

🎁 Who Collects These

These end up with Vikings fans first — the ones who grew up under the Metrodome roof, or with parents who did — and with collectors of '90s licensed NFL novelties who like the cheap, cheerful stuff that never survived because it was made to be used. It's also a favorite pickup for fans buying gifts — a parent or grandparent who remembers Randy Moss's rookie year, a Vikings fan building out a man cave, or anyone who wants a piece of licensed NFL history small enough to display in a shadow box.

Is your team going to win it all??? I love football so much that I might be wearing some of these myself — my daughter will love it too. 😉 I won't even mention who my team is. I was able to save this one from Florida and grabbed it because I didn't want it lost — I hope you love it as much as I do. The supply is finite - nobody's printing 1997 Vikings fingernail tattoos again, and once these last unused packs are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.