Vintage 1997 NFL Fingernail Tattoos 🏈 Denver Broncos Play By Play San Antonio TX Card

Fingernail Tattoos for Broncos Fans? 🐴 Bronco Orange, Right at the Fingertips

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

For a certain kind of Broncos fan in the late 1990s, team pride didn't stop at the jersey — it went all the way down to the fingernails. These cards have sat sealed since the year they were printed, a small, unused sliver of the exact season Denver finally broke through.

🃏 What's Actually on the Card

Ten horse-head tattoos fill the sheet, eight small and two larger, 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 and MADE IN TAIWAN. I love the little stadium painted up top, goal posts and pennants flying over the stands, and the NFL shield on it is the old one, a football set in a big field of stars. The league used that shield until 2008, when it trimmed the 25 stars down to eight, one for each division, and reshaped the football to look like the one on the Lombardi Trophy. Down in the corner sits the small "Not recommended for children under 3 years of age," and along the bottom of the sheet runs © 1997 NFL Properties, Inc. — the league's own licensing arm, set up in 1963 to keep control of the NFL's and its teams' marks and to license the companies making official merchandise. The back walks through four application steps using a Pittsburgh Steelers logo as the example art — a shared back Play-By-Play used across every team in the line, not a Broncos misprint — and closes with DISTRIBUTED BY Play-By-Play TOYS & NOVELTIES, SAN ANTONIO, TX 78218-0267. The steps are drawn in line art under a TEMPORARY TATTOOS heading, and the fine print adds that the same steps work on skin, and that they come off with "alcohol or any leading brand cold cream." 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.

🏆 1997: A Brand New Horse, and a Championship

That horse head wasn't an old logo — it was brand new the very year this card was printed. Denver unveiled it on February 4, 1997, the first Nike-heavy redesign in the NFL, a sharp break from the horse-in-a-D mark the team had worn since 1993. Owner Pat Bowlen said the uniforms had gone "essentially the same for 30 years" and "I felt we needed a change"; defensive end Neil Smith called the new look "bad-ass," and safety Steve Atwater put it simply — "Navy blue looks meaner than orange." Whatever the horse thought of it, it worked: under head coach Mike Shanahan, Denver went 12-4 that season, beat Jacksonville 42-17 as a wild card, won at Kansas City and at Pittsburgh, and beat the defending-champion Green Bay Packers 31-24 in Super Bowl XXXII on January 25, 1998 — the franchise's first championship after four earlier Super Bowl losses. Terrell Davis was named MVP despite losing most of the second quarter to a migraine; he'd rushed for 1,750 yards and 15 touchdowns that season. John Elway, Davis, Shannon Sharpe and center Tom Nalen all made the Pro Bowl. This card carries the very logo that won it.

📜 The Lore of the Twelve

Collectors who've chased this line for years say Play-By-Play only ever made this fingernail-tattoo card for about a dozen NFL teams in 1997 before moving on. It squares with what turns up team by team: this Broncos card, and cards for the Dolphins, 49ers, Panthers, Browns, Vikings, Chiefs, Jaguars, Raiders, Patriots, Cowboys and Bears, all on the same design.

🎪 Play-By-Play, San Antonio

The distributor named on the back has a story worth telling too. Arturo Torres left Cuba for the United States in 1961 and got his start washing dishes at a Pizza Hut in Texas; by the 1980s he was running 240 Pizza Hut and Taco Bell locations, which he sold for $125 million in 1992. He turned 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. That was 4400 Tejasco — offices, a showroom and better than 200,000 square feet of warehouse — and the ZIP on the back, 78218-0267, is the company's own: it's the exact number Play-By-Play gave for that address in Play Meter's 1997 amusement-industry directory. In fiscal 1997 nearly 70 percent of their sales went to the amusement trade — Six Flags, Busch Gardens, Sea World, Dave & Buster's, carnivals, state fairs and arcades — so plenty of the stuffed animals won at '90s carnivals and fairs came from this one San Antonio outfit. By then it was a public company, trading on the Nasdaq as PBYP, and it was reaching overseas too: in November 1996 it bought the TLC Gift Company of Doncaster, England, a plush and novelty distributor that supplied shops and amusement operators all over Europe. It didn't last: Play-By-Play fell off the Nasdaq in 2001, Torres resigned as chairman that June, and the company stopped filing with the SEC that September. A European branch carried the Play-By-Play name forward out of Valencia, Spain, and is still making plush toys today.