Vintage 1997 Miami Dolphins NFL Fingernail Tattoos 🏈 Sealed Pack - Play-By-Play San Antonio Licensed Novelty Card

Fingernail Tattoos for Dolphins Fans? 🏈 Vintage 1997 Miami Dolphins NFL Sealed Pack, Play-By-Play San Antonio

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

🏈 What's In the Pack

This is a sealed, New Old Stock pack of Miami Dolphins NFL Fingernail Tattoos, distributed by Play-By-Play Toys & Novelties of San Antonio, Texas, and made in Taiwan — the copyright line "© 1997 NFL Properties, Inc. All rights reserved" is printed right on both the header and the tattoo sheet itself. NFL Properties was the league's own licensing arm, set up in 1963 to keep control of the league's and the teams' marks and to license them out to the companies making official NFL merchandise, so that little line is the league's permission slip for every dolphin on the sheet. The front sets the old star-spangled NFL shield over a painted stadium scene, 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.

Underneath sits a tan sheet of ten Dolphins logos arranged in a ring, and if you look closely they're printed mirror-reversed — the dolphin faces the wrong way and the tiny TM reads backwards. That's not a printing mistake, it's how a water-slide transfer works: it goes down tattoo-side first, so the backwards image on the sheet reads correctly once it's pressed on and the paper backing peels away. Flip it over and the back walks you through four application steps in little red-line drawings — peel off the protective sheet, press it down tattoo-side-down, wet the back with a sponge or cloth, wait 20-30 seconds, then peel off the backing, rinse and let it dry. Below the drawings it says the same steps work on skin, and when you're done you just wipe the tattoo off with alcohol "or any leading brand cold cream." I love that cold cream line. Here's the fun part: the sample tattoo in those drawings is a Pittsburgh Steelers logo, not a Dolphins one. Play-By-Play clearly drew up one generic instruction back and ran it across every team in the line. At the bottom it reads "DISTRIBUTED BY Play-By-Play TOYS & NOVELTIES, SAN ANTONIO, TX 78218-0267" — the company's actual address on file was 4400 Tejasco Street. Collectors say Play-By-Play only made this pack for about a dozen NFL teams, which makes chasing a full team run half the fun.

🐬 1997: The Year the Dolphins Got a New Look

The logo on this sheet wasn't an old standby — it was brand new for 1997, the Dolphins' first major logo redesign. The leaping dolphin got a heavier navy-blue outline and more defined features, and the sunburst behind it switched from thin lines to the bolder, pointed burst you see on the sheet, a look the team kept on its helmets all the way through the 2012 season. It went with a bigger uniform overhaul that year too — darker aqua, a navy drop-shadow on the numbers.

On the field, 1997 was head coach Jimmy Johnson's second season in Miami, with Wayne Huizenga owning the club and Dan Marino still at quarterback out of Pro Player Stadium. The Dolphins went 9-7 and finished second in the AFC East, losing the division to New England 14-12 on Monday Night Football and then losing the Wild Card rematch at New England a week later, 17-3 — the Patriots beat them three times that season. Defensive tackle Tim Bowens made the Pro Bowl, and despite the rough finish, 1997 kicked off a run of five straight playoff appearances for Miami. This pack caught the Dolphins right as they debuted the look their fans wore for the next decade and a half.

🎪 Play-By-Play Toys & Novelties, San Antonio

The company behind these tattoos started small. Arturo Torres left Cuba for America in 1961 hoping to become a cowboy. Instead he found a job washing dishes at a Pizza Hut in Texas, and he worked his way up until he was running 240 Pizza Hut and Taco Bell restaurants. In 1986, while he still had the restaurants, he started Play-By-Play as a vending-machine prize supplier, and within six years he had sold the restaurant business for $125 million. In 1990 he brought in Jay Foreman to co-found Play-By-Play Toys & Novelties with him in San Antonio and push it past the prize business into retail, and Foreman ran it as general manager until 1996. In 1992 Foreman landed the company's first big licenses: stuffed toys carrying the Coca-Cola and Harley-Davidson names. Walmart picked them up and became Play-By-Play's first traditional retail customer, the step that took the company from amusement parks and carnivals onto mass-market store shelves. From that start in San Antonio it grew fast — buying its largest competitor, Ace Novelty of Bellevue, Washington, in 1996 gave it real reach into carnivals and amusement parks. By July 1997, the year printed on this pack, Play-By-Play had about 620 people on the payroll, 600 on the toy side and 20 in vending, and sales for the year had jumped to $137.4 million from $74.2 million the year before. By 1998 it held about half of the whole carnival prize market, supplying places like Six Flags, Busch Gardens, Sea World, and Dave & Buster's, alongside licensed toys sold at Walmart, Kmart, Target, and Toys "R" Us. Sports licenses like this NFL tattoo pack joined the roster as the company kept adding trademarks through the late '90s, all run out of that Tejasco Street warehouse.

It didn't last forever — Play-By-Play hit financial trouble by 2001, Torres stepped down as chairman that June, and the company was delisted from Nasdaq. Its European arm survived, though — it moved its headquarters to Spain in 2002, the toy group Famosa bought it in 2006, and it still makes plush toys out of Valencia today, a long way from a San Antonio warehouse full of licensed novelties and a sheet of Dolphins tattoos.