Vintage 1997 NFL Fingernail Tattoos Carolina Panthers 🏈 It's Football Season!!!

Fingernail Tattoos for Panthers Fans? 🏈 Vintage 1997 Carolina Panthers NFL Sealed Pack

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

🏈 What's In the Pack

This is a sealed, New Old Stock pack of Carolina Panthers NFL Fingernail Tattoos, distributed by Play-By-Play Toys & Novelties of San Antonio, Texas, and made in Taiwan, carrying the printed copyright "© 1997 NFL Properties, Inc. All rights reserved." on the tattoo sheet. The header card sets the star-spangled NFL shield over a painted stadium field, lists the pitch in plain black type — Easy to apply, Easy to remove, Waterproof, Lasts for days, Safe & non-toxic — and stamps FINGERNAIL TATTOOS across the turf in bold yellow, with "Not recommended for children under 3 years of age" and MADE IN TAIWAN printed beside it.

No team name is printed anywhere on this one — the logo does all the talking. Ten black panther-head tattoos with light-blue trim 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. Flip the card over and the back, headed TEMPORARY TATTOOS, walks through the four-step application in little red-line drawings — remove the sheet, press it down tattoo-side-down, wet the paper, peel and rinse. Underneath, it tells you the same steps work right on skin, and when the game's over, a wipe of alcohol or any leading brand cold cream takes them off. 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." As near as I can tell, Play-By-Play only made this card for about a dozen NFL teams back then, which makes chasing a full team run half the fun.

🐾 1997: A Young Team on the Rise

The panther head on this sheet is the Panthers' original logo, the one the franchise wore from its very first season in 1995 until the club's first redesign in 2012 — so on this 1997 card, it's the logo of a team only in its third season. That shape wasn't an accident, either: the panther head was drawn to mimic the outline of North and South Carolina together.

The NFL's 28 owners voted the Panthers in unanimously on October 26, 1993, as the league's 29th franchise. The man behind the bid, Jerry Richardson, had caught a touchdown pass from Johnny Unitas for the Baltimore Colts in the 1959 NFL Championship Game, and he used his championship-game bonus as seed money for his first Hardee's in Spartanburg, South Carolina. With the Charlotte stadium still going up, the Panthers played their first season, 1995, at Clemson's Memorial Stadium — and went 7-9, the best debut any expansion team had ever put up.

The season before this card was printed, their first in the brand-new Charlotte stadium, Carolina went 12-4, won the NFC West, and took a first-round playoff bye — then beat the defending Super Bowl champion Dallas Cowboys 26-17 before losing the NFC Championship Game 30-13 to Green Bay, under head coach Dom Capers. By 1997, the year printed on this card, the Panthers had come back to earth a bit: 7-9, second in the NFC West, Capers' third season as coach, with Bill Polian as general manager and Jerry Richardson as owner, playing out of Ericsson Stadium — the building known today as Bank of America Stadium. It was the first season the Panthers ever played a Monday Night Football game. Tight end Wesley Walls made the Pro Bowl that year, and kick returner Michael Bates earned first-team AP All-Pro honors. Linebacker Sam Mills was playing his last season for Carolina that year, too.

Keep that name in mind, because Sam Mills is where the team's motto comes from. He stayed on as a coach, and in August 2003, while coaching the linebackers, he was diagnosed with intestinal cancer. On January 2, 2004, out on the practice field the day before a playoff game against Dallas, he told the team that when he found out, there were two things he could do: quit or keep pounding. He kept pounding. Nobody filmed it — it lives on because the players who heard it remember it. Carolina beat the Cowboys 29-10 the next night and rode that run all the way to Super Bowl XXXVIII, losing 32-29 to New England, with this same panther head still the team's logo. Mills died in April 2005, but his words stuck: "Keep Pounding" is the team's official slogan, and since 2012 somebody bangs the Keep Pounding drum before every home game.

🎪 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 this card. 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.

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 these from Florida and grabbed them because I didn't want them lost. I'm so pumped for football season that just listing these gets my adrenaline running. My team is one of these tattoos — I might have them on my forehead during games — and hopefully we see your team in the Super Bowl. Go Panthers!!!