Vintage 1999 NFL Fingernail Tattoos Cleveland Browns on 1997 Card 🏈 It's Football Season!!!

Why Is a 1999 Browns Pack on a 1997 Card? 🏈 Vintage Cleveland Browns NFL Fingernail Tattoos

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

🟠 Two Years, One Pack

Look closely at this one and you'll find two different printed copyright years. The white tattoo sheet reads "© 1999 NFL Properties, Inc. All rights reserved." — sitting right on top of the header card underneath, which is printed "© 1997 NFL Properties, Inc." That's not a mistake. The Cleveland Browns didn't play a single down between 1996 and 1998: the team's organization moved to Baltimore and became the Ravens, but the deal that let that happen kept the Browns name, colors, history, records and intellectual property in Cleveland, with the city agreeing to build a new stadium and the NFL agreeing to bring the Browns back onto the field by 1999. The move itself became official on November 6, 1995, with the team sitting at 4-5, when owner Art Modell held a press conference at Camden Yards in Baltimore and announced he'd signed a deal to move the Browns there for the 1996 season. The agreement that kept the name in Cleveland was struck on February 8, 1996, and the very next day the league announced the Browns would be "deactivated" for no more than three years. Ohio even passed a law in 1996 — people still call it the Modell Law — saying a team that had benefited from a public stadium or public money couldn't just pack up and move to another city without six months' notice and a chance for local folks to buy the team. A 1999 Browns sheet sitting on a leftover 1997 card is a small printed souvenir of exactly that gap.

Ten orange helmet tattoos sit on the sheet, gray facemasks drawn in, and the two larger ones spell out BROWNS across the shell — mirror-reversed, like every tattoo in this pack, because these are water-slide transfers that go on tattoo-side-down and read correctly only once they're pressed onto a nail and the backing peels away. The header card itself carries the usual NFL shield over a painted stadium, the pitch in plain black type (Easy to apply, Easy to remove, Waterproof, Lasts for days, Safe & non-toxic), and FINGERNAIL TATTOOS stamped in yellow across the turf. Flip it over and the four-step instructions use a Pittsburgh Steelers tattoo as the example — which is a nice bit of irony, since the Steelers were the team that beat the returning Browns 43-0 in their first game back. "DISTRIBUTED BY Play-By-Play TOYS & NOVELTIES, SAN ANTONIO, TX 78218-0267" runs along the bottom. The same steps work right on your skin, too, and the card even tells you how to get one off after the game: "Wipe tattoo with alcohol or any leading brand cold cream."

🏈 The Helmet Is the Logo

The Browns' actual team logo from 1999 to 2001 wasn't a separate mark at all — it was simply this orange helmet, shown in profile, with a white facemask and a brown-white-brown stripe down the center. No word, no mascot, just the helmet itself. The tattoo artist took a small liberty with it: the "BROWNS" lettering across two of the helmets here isn't on the real logo, and the facemask is drawn gray instead of the actual white — a little flourish all its own. That bare helmet is a Browns tradition in itself: to this day they're the only team in the NFL with no logo on their helmets. The club goes back to 1944, when Arthur "Mickey" McBride landed a franchise in the All-America Football Conference, and it was named for its first coach and co-founder, Paul Brown — though there's an old Cleveland story that the name was really a nod to boxer Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber.

🟤 1999: Football Comes Home

The season stamped on this sheet was the one Cleveland had been waiting three years for. Al Lerner owned the reactivated franchise, Chris Palmer was head coach, Dwight Clark was general manager, and the team's number-one draft pick was quarterback Tim Couch out of Kentucky, all playing out of a brand-new Cleveland Browns Stadium built on the site of the old one. The home opener, September 12, 1999, was against the Pittsburgh Steelers — Cleveland native Drew Carey gave a pregame speech — and the Steelers won 43-0. The Browns got their revenge later that season, beating Pittsburgh 16-15 on the road, but finished the year 2-14, sixth in the AFC Central. Win-loss record aside, this sheet is a piece of the year the Browns' name, history and colors finally came back to the field where they belonged. And if you've ever heard Browns fans bark, here's where that comes from: the Dawg Pound started at the 1985 training camp at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland, Ohio, when cornerbacks Hanford Dixon and Frank Minnifield got the defense barking after every sack — the quarterback was the cat, and they were the dogs. The fans started barking right along with them, and the first "Dawg Pound" banner went up at the old Cleveland Stadium.

🎪 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. Besides the NFL, its annual reports for 1998 and 1999 name licenses for Major League Baseball, the NHL and Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes gang — Tweety, Sylvester, Bugs Bunny and the Tasmanian Devil among them. 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. If you're confident in your team, this is the moment for the Super Bowl Package; if not, I know what that means. 😉 I won't even mention who my team is. Okay, my team is one of these tattoos, and I might have them on my forehead during games. Hopefully we see your team in the Super Bowl. Go Browns!!! I was able to save these from Florida and grabbed them because I didn't want them lost, and near as I can tell they made about a dozen different teams back then.