Vintage 1997 NFL Oakland Raiders Fingernail Tattoos 🏈 Play-By-Play San Antonio NOS Football Fan Nail Card Superbowl Party Gift

Fingernail Tattoos for Raiders Fans? 🏴 Silver and Black, Right on the Fingernail

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

There's a particular kind of fan who paints the team colors onto every inch of themselves before kickoff, and for a stretch of the 1990s, a set of Raiders fingernail tattoos was how you did it in miniature. These cards have sat sealed since they left the factory — never pressed onto a nail, never worn to a game — a small silver-and-black time capsule from Raider Nation's heyday.

🃏 What's Actually on the Card

Ten Raiders shields fill the cream sheet on the lower half of the card — the helmeted, eye-patched Raider crossing swords, RAIDERS lettered across the top — 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. Above them, the header card carries the NFL shield over a stadium scene, the five-point sales 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 and you get four hand-drawn application steps — and a nice little oddity: the sample tattoo drawn for the instructions isn't a Raider at all, it's a Pittsburgh Steelers logo, because Play-By-Play used the same generic back across every team in the line. The card closes out with 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 whole batch — expect the same clean, never-applied condition throughout, with most running as nice or nicer than what's pictured.

🏈 The Raiders, Back Home in 1997

The shield on this sheet is the same Raider head and crossed swords the franchise has worn since the 1960s — silver on black, unmistakable — and by 1997 it was flying at home again: the Raiders had moved back to Oakland in 1995 after thirteen years in Los Angeles, on a sixteen-year lease that rebuilt the Coliseum with a new upper deck and luxury boxes. On the field, 1997 wasn't kind — Joe Bugel's first season as head coach ended 4-12, the franchise's worst finish since 1962 — but wide receiver Tim Brown and defensive tackle Darrell Russell both made the Pro Bowl that year, and Raider Nation still packed the Coliseum right through it. This card is a small piece of that exact season.

🎪 Play-By-Play, San Antonio

The company that put its name on the back of this card has a story of its own. Arturo Torres left Cuba for the United States in 1961 and went to work in the kitchen of an Amarillo Pizza Hut in 1965; he rose to manager, bought out the franchise, and built Pizza Management, Inc. into more than 230 Pizza Huts in seven states, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Spain before selling it to PepsiCo in 1993. He built Play-By-Play out of a vending-machine prize business into the country's biggest supplier to the carnival and theme-park trade — something close to half that market by 1998, with Warner Bros., Disney and NFL licenses on its plush and novelties, and in 2000 its Tornado Taz plush even landed it in the law books as Nadel v. Play-By-Play Toys & Novelties, a Second Circuit idea-theft case heard by a panel that included Sonia Sotomayor — all run out of a warehouse on Tejasco Street in San Antonio, the same "SAN ANTONIO, TX" printed on this card. The good years didn't last past 2001: Play-By-Play fell off the Nasdaq, Torres resigned as chairman that June, and the U.S. company stopped filing with the SEC a few months later. A European branch kept the Play-By-Play name alive out of Valencia, Spain, and is still making plush toys today.

🏴 I love finding these old Raiders pieces — a set of fingernail tattoos was exactly how a certain kind of fan showed team pride in the 90s, right down to their hands.