Vintage 1997 NFL Fingernail Tattoos Chicago Bears 🏈 Score Big for Fans, It's Football Season!!!

Fingernail Tattoos for Bears Fans? 🐻 Da Bears, Ten Times Over

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

Tattoos are fingernail size. 🙃

There's a particular kind of Bears fan who wants that snarling bear head everywhere, and for a stretch in the late 1990s that meant a fingernail too. These cards have sat sealed since they left the factory — never pressed onto a nail, still carrying the bear head the Bears wore before switching logos in 1999. This is a 1997 sheet of officially licensed Chicago Bears fingernail tattoos, copyright NFL Properties, Inc., distributed by Play-By-Play Toys & Novelties of San Antonio, Texas.

🃏 What's Actually on the Card

Ten bear-head tattoos fill the cream sheet in an oval — four across the top, four across the bottom, and one larger bear at each side — a snarling, black-and-orange head with a red tongue. Like the rest of this line, the sheet is printed mirror-image so it transfers correctly once pressed face-down, though you'd never notice on this one: the bear head faces straight on, so it looks the same either direction. Above the tattoos, the header card carries the NFL shield over a stadium scene, the five-point pitch (Easy to apply, Easy to remove, Waterproof, Lasts for days, Safe & non-toxic), FINGERNAIL TATTOOS in bold yellow, and MADE IN TAIWAN. Flip it over for four application steps drawn with a Pittsburgh Steelers logo as the example — Play-By-Play's shared back across every team in the line, not a Bears misprint — and DISTRIBUTED BY Play-By-Play TOYS & NOVELTIES, SAN ANTONIO, TX 78218-0267. These come to us as a stack, and the card photographed here is a fair sample of the batch — expect the same clean, never-applied condition throughout, with most running as nice or nicer than what's pictured. Small print on the front adds "Not recommended for children under 3 years of age," and the bottom edge reads © 1997 NFL Properties, Inc. All rights reserved. The back is headed TEMPORARY TATTOOS: remove the protective sheet from the front of the tattoo, press firmly tattoo side down, wet the back thoroughly with a sponge or cloth, then wait 20 to 30 seconds, carefully peel off the backing, rinse and let dry. "Follow the same instructions to apply to skin," it adds, so they work on a cheek at a watch party too; for removal, wipe with alcohol "or any leading brand cold cream" - "Tattoos are easily removable anytime." Each card sits in its own clear sleeve with all ten tattoos in place.

🏈 A Logo on Its Way Out, in a Rough Year

That snarling bear head is the Bears' classic alternate mark, in use from 1963 all the way to 1998 — this card catches it in its very last seasons, two years before Chicago switched to the more familiar orange-dominant bear head still worn today. On the field, 1997 wasn't a strong year: under head coach Dave Wannstedt, the Bears went 4-12 out of Soldier Field, 5th in the NFC Central and the only team in that division to miss the playoffs, with a defense that allowed a franchise-record 421 points. It was Chicago's first four-win season since 1975. Quarterback Erik Kramer still passed for more than 3,000 yards that year, one of his two full seasons as the Bears' starter. This card carries the very bear head that was on its way out.

🎪 Play-By-Play, San Antonio

The distributor printed on the back has its own story. Arturo Torres left Cuba for the United States in 1961 and started out washing dishes at a Texas Pizza Hut; by the 1980s he was running 240 Pizza Hut and Taco Bell locations, which he sold for $125 million in 1992. He put that into Play-By-Play, building a vending-machine prize business into the country's biggest supplier to carnivals and theme parks — something close to half that market by 1998 — out of a warehouse on Tejasco Street in San Antonio, the same city printed on this card. The run didn't last past 2001: Play-By-Play fell off the Nasdaq, Torres resigned as chairman that June, and the company stopped filing with the SEC that September. A European branch kept the Play-By-Play name going out of Valencia, Spain, and still makes plush toys today. Torres had started Play-By-Play in San Antonio in 1986, while he was still running the restaurants, supplying the small stuffed animals and novelties you'd win out of a claw machine or an amusement-park prize counter. Licensing turned out to be the real business - Looney Tunes characters, pro sports logos and corporate trademarks on plush toys and novelties like this card. The company went public in 1995 and in 1996 paid $44 million for Ace Novelty Company of Bellevue, Washington.

🏈 Why an NFL Logo Could Be on This Card at All

None of it would have been legal without that small copyright line. NFL Properties was founded in 1963 when the owners of the league's 14 teams, under Commissioner Pete Rozelle, assigned all rights to their trademarks to a single licensing arm to control the league's and each team's brand - with the royalties pooled and shared equally among the teams. That arrangement is what turned team logos into everyday fan merchandise, right down to a fingernail.

🐻 From the Decatur Staleys to "Da Bears"

The Bears began in 1920 as the Decatur Staleys, the company team of the A. E. Staley Manufacturing Company, a food-starch maker in Decatur, Illinois, which hired George Halas and Edward Sternaman to run it. The club moved to Chicago in 1921 as the Chicago Staleys, and in 1922 Halas renamed it the Bears, a nod to the Chicago Cubs, since a bear's young are called cubs. The Bears played home games at Wrigley Field through the 1970 season and have played at Soldier Field since. They have won nine NFL championships, the most recent in Super Bowl XX after the 1985 season, a 46 to 10 win over the New England Patriots.

Two pieces of Bears legend travel with every logo. "Monsters of the Midway" first belonged to the University of Chicago Maroons, Amos Alonzo Stagg's college team, named for the Midway Plaisance boulevard on the edge of their South Side campus; the Bears inherited the discarded nickname, and it stuck for good with their dominant teams of 1940 and 1941. The other legend is pure television. On January 12, 1991, Saturday Night Live debuted "Bill Swerski's Superfans," with Joe Mantegna, Chris Farley, Mike Myers and Robert Smigel in dark glasses and thick Mike Ditka mustaches, and turned the Chicago pronunciation "Da Bears" into a national catchphrase. Six years after that sketch, fans could put da bear right on their fingernails.

Is your team going to win it all??? If you are confident in your team I want to see you take advantage of the Super Bowl Package - if not, I know what that means! 🤪 My pictures seriously don't do it justice. I am so pumped for football season, just listing this is getting my adrenaline running.

🐻 I love football enough that I might wear a few of these myself before kickoff — my daughter would get a kick out of it too. I won't tell you who my team is. I'll give you one hint, though: my team is one of these tattoos, and I just might have them on my forehead during games. Hopefully we see your team in the Super Bowl. Go Bears!!!

The vintage stickers are a reminder of a bygone era in the NFL. Original NFL licensed vintage items are extremely collectible or also really neat to wear, as it is the dominant sport in the USA and the interest won't go away anytime soon! 😉 It looks like they only made 12 different teams for this promotional run back then.

I was able to save these from Florida, and I grabbed them because I didn't want them lost. I hope you love them as much as I do!