Vintage 1997 NFL Fingernail Tattoos Dallas Cowboys 🏈 It's Football Season!!!

Fingernail Tattoos for Cowboys Fans? ⭐ The Star, Same Card, Same Sunday

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

Dallas fans in the late 1990s wore the star everywhere, and for a stretch that meant a fingernail too. These cards have sat sealed since they left the factory — never pressed onto a nail, still carrying the exact shade of blue the Cowboys had just switched to. I was able to save these from Florida and grabbed them because I didn't want them lost, and I hope you love them as much as I do.

🃏 What's Actually on the Card

Ten navy star tattoos fill the cream sheet — COWBOYS mirror-printed beneath each one, eight small in two rows of four plus two larger at the sides — printed mirror-image so they read correctly once pressed face-down and transferred, the same way any water-slide decal works. The header card above 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 Cowboys misprint — and DISTRIBUTED BY Play-By-Play TOYS & NOVELTIES, SAN ANTONIO, TX 78218-0267. Every card in the stack is still sealed and has never been applied.

🏈 A New Shade of Blue, in a Rough Year

That star is a slightly different blue than the one Dallas wore for thirty years before it — 1997 was the first season the Cowboys darkened their star from the lighter royal blue they'd used since 1967 to the deeper navy on this sheet. It was a rough year to debut a new shade: under Barry Switzer, in what turned out to be his fourth and final season as head coach, the Cowboys went 6-10 out of Texas Stadium, their first losing season since 1990, missing the playoffs after six straight postseason trips that had included three Super Bowl wins that decade. Guards Larry Allen and Nate Newton still made the Pro Bowl that year, alongside cornerback Deion Sanders and safety Darren Woodson, even as reports of infighting between quarterback Troy Aikman and Switzer swirled through the season. Switzer resigned once it ended. This card carries the very star that debuted, for better or worse, that year.

🎪 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, a fittingly Texan home for a Texas team's 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.

🙌 A Note From Me

I love football so much I might be wearing some of these myself, and my daughter will love them too. Dallas has been called America's Team ever since NFL Films producer Bob Ryan wrote that line into the Cowboys' 1978 highlight film, and Pat Summerall said it on CBS when the next season opened, so a Cowboys fan with a star on every nail is in good company. 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 Cowboys!!!