Vintage 1997 NFL Fingernail Tattoos Jacksonville Jaguars 🏈 It's Football Season!!!

Fingernail Tattoos for Jaguars Fans? 🏈 Vintage 1997 Jacksonville Jaguars NFL Sealed Pack

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

🏈 What's In the Pack

This is a sealed, New Old Stock pack of Jacksonville Jaguars 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.

Ten gold, black-spotted jaguar heads with open jaws and a teal tongue sit on the tan sheet, printed mirror-reversed so the image 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, oddly, 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." This pack was saved from Florida — the Jaguars' own home state. 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.

🐆 The Jaguar, the Car Company, and 1997

This exact jaguar head — gold, black-spotted, teal tongue — was the Jaguars' primary logo from their first season in 1995 all the way through 2012 (with only a small shade-of-gold adjustment in 2002), so it's the mark the team wore in the season printed on this card, their third. It wasn't their first idea, though: when the franchise was awarded in 1993, its original logo was a leaping jaguar, dropped after the carmaker Jaguar objected. A real legal dispute followed — Jaguar Cars, Ltd. v. National Football League made it to federal court — and as the story is usually told, it ended with Jaguar Cars becoming the team's official automobile and this head design replacing the leaping cat before the franchise's first kickoff in 1995.

In just their second season, 1996, the Jaguars pulled off a 30-27 road upset over a 13-3 Denver team — a game a lot of people still call the franchise's finest hour — before losing the AFC Championship Game 20-6 at New England. By 1997, the year printed on this card, Jacksonville had settled into a genuinely good football team: 11-5, second in the AFC Central, with Tom Coughlin serving as both general manager and head coach, playing out of Alltel Stadium. They lost the Wild Card game 42-17 at Denver. That preseason the team actually tried a skinny, drop-shadow jersey number, got complaints that it was unreadable on television, and widened it before the regular season started. Five Jaguars made the Pro Bowl that year: tackle Tony Boselli, quarterback Mark Brunell, receiver Jimmy Smith, punter Bryan Barker, and kicker Mike Hollis.

🎪 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 — 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.

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. 😉 I won't even mention who my team is. My team is one of these tattoos, though, and I might have them on my forehead etc. during games — hopefully we see your team in the Super Bowl.

Go Jaguars!!!