Vintage 1997 NFL Fingernail Tattoos San Francisco 49ers 🏈 It's Football Season!!!

Fingernail Tattoos for Niners Fans? 🏈 Vintage 1997 San Francisco 49ers NFL Sealed Pack

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

It's Football Season!!! Are you ready to show some team spirit? The year printed on this package is 1997, and that was a stubborn season to be a 49ers fan. The team opened it under a brand-new head coach, lost Jerry Rice to a wrecked knee in the very first game, saw Steve Young knocked out on the opening drive, and still went 13-3 behind the best defense in the league. These are the tattoos a fan could press onto every fingernail that fall: red 49ERS wordmarks on a little card, licensed by NFL Properties and distributed by a San Antonio toy company with a rags-to-riches founder.

🏈 What's In the Pack

This is a sealed, New Old Stock pack of San Francisco 49ers 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.

The sheet underneath doesn't carry the team's oval helmet logo — all ten tattoos are the maroon "49ERS" wordmark, in an old-style slab-serif face, and they're printed mirror-reversed, so the backwards lettering on the sheet 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 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, for whatever reason, 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 this card for about a dozen NFL teams, which makes chasing a full team run half the fun.

Ten tattoos come on the sheet, one for every nail on both hands: eight fingernail-size in two rows of four, plus a larger pair between them. The instruction card is headed TEMPORARY TATTOOS and spells the steps out word for word - remove the protective sheet, press firmly tattoo-side down, wet the back thoroughly with a sponge or cloth, wait 20-30 seconds, then carefully peel off the backing, rinse and let dry. It adds "Follow the same instructions to apply to skin," and says to remove them by wiping with alcohol or any leading brand cold cream. That nine-digit ZIP on the bottom line is a little time stamp of its own: the Postal Service only added the extra four digits in 1983.

The copyright line belongs to the league itself. NFL Properties was founded in 1963, with Commissioner Pete Rozelle behind it, to keep control of the league's and the teams' brands and to license outside companies to make official NFL merchandise - Rozelle was commissioner from 1960 to 1989. That printed line is why Play-By-Play could put the 49ers' name on a card at all.

🏆 The 1997 49ers

The "49ERS" wordmark on this sheet is the same style the club used from 1972 all the way to 2004, simplified down to tattoo size. It's worth noting the team's actual primary logo in 1997 was the red-and-gold "SF" oval, not this wordmark — Play-By-Play went with the lettering instead.

On the field, the 49ers went 13-3 in 1997 and finished first in the NFC West under head coach Steve Mariucci, with Edward J. DeBartolo Jr. as owner and Carmen Policy as president, playing out of 3Com Park at Candlestick. They beat the Minnesota Vikings 38-22 in the divisional round, then lost the NFC Championship Game 23-10 to the Green Bay Packers — the third year running the Packers ended San Francisco's season, and the 49ers' fifth trip to an NFC title game that decade, a run they wouldn't match again until 2011. Six 49ers made the Pro Bowl that year: quarterback Steve Young, guard Kevin Gogan, defensive tackle Dana Stubblefield, and linebackers Ken Norton Jr. and Lee Woodall, plus safety Merton Hanks. Jerry Rice missed 14 regular-season games in 1997 — one of only 17 he sat out across a 20-year career.

How that season went is a story in itself. George Seifert resigned as head coach in mid-January 1997, and two days later the 49ers hired Steve Mariucci away from Cal. His first game, on the road at Tampa Bay, went about as badly as a debut can. Warren Sapp sacked Steve Young on the very first drive, and Young left with another concussion - his third in ten months - bad enough that his agent and his family were talking about retirement. Jerry Rice caught four passes for 38 yards and then went down; the MRI found torn ligaments and cartilage in his left knee, and he had surgery the next day at Stanford Hospital. Young came back. Rice came back too, for a quarter and a half against Denver on December 15, and cracked his kneecap on the same knee coming down with a catch. With new running back Garrison Hearst and the NFL's number-one defense, San Francisco still won the West, beat the Vikings on January 3, 1998, and lost to the Packers in the NFC Championship on January 11.

⛏️ Why They Are the Forty-Niners

The team takes its name from the prospectors of the 1849 California Gold Rush, the men who went down in legend as the Forty-Niners. Tony Morabito founded the club in 1946 as a charter member of the All-America Football Conference and ran it until 1957, when he died of a heart attack at Kezar Stadium watching his own team play; the 49ers had come into the NFL when the two leagues merged in 1949. Under coach Bill Walsh and his West Coast offense, with Joe Montana throwing to Jerry Rice and later Steve Young at quarterback, San Francisco won five Super Bowls: XVI for the 1981 season, XIX for 1984, XXIII for 1988, XXIV for 1989 and XXIX for 1994. That 1989 team beat Denver 55-10 in Super Bowl XXIV.

🎪 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. In 1996 it bought Ace Novelty, 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 — and by 1998 the company held roughly half of the entire carnival prize market. 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.

The name on the back of the card comes with a remarkable founder. Arturo Torres came to the United States from Cuba in 1961 and started out washing dishes at a Texas Pizza Hut. By the 1980s he ran some 240 Pizza Hut and Taco Bell restaurants; he sold them for $125 million, and Play-By-Play, begun as a vending-machine prize supplier, was a public company on Nasdaq by 1995. The company histories say the May 1996 Ace Novelty deal, about $44 million, made it the largest supplier of stuffed toys and novelties in the United States, and alongside its sports deals it licensed Looney Tunes, Disney and Marvel characters. Its headquarters moved to Spain in 2002, and the Play by Play name still makes plush toys in Europe today.

🏈 From Me

Is your team going to win it all??? I love football so much that I might be wearing some of these! My daughter will love it. 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!🤪 I won't even mention who my team is.😉 My pictures seriously don't do it justice. 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!😉 I was able to save these from Florida and grabbed them as I didn't want them lost. I hope you guys agree and love them too! They seem to have only made 12 different teams back then for this promotional item. I am so pumped for football season - just listing this is getting 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 49ers!!!

🎁 Who Will Love These

• 🏈 A 49ers fan who remembers the Montana, Rice and Young years
• 💅 Game day: they're made for fingernails, and the card says the same steps work on skin
• 📦 Collectors of 1990s NFL licensed novelties and San Antonio toy history
• 🎉 A fun stocking stuffer or party favor for a football family