Vintage 1997 NFL Fingernail Tattoos Chicago Bears 🏈 It's Football Season!!!

Size: 2.5 x 2.5 inches ~ They vary a little one to the next.

🐻 Da Bears, Ten Times Over

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.

🃏 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.

🏈 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.