Vintage 1997 NFL Fingernail Tattoos San Francisco 49ers 🏈 It's Football Season!!!

Fingernail Tattoos for Niners Fans? 🏈 Vintage 1997 San Francisco 49ers 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 San Francisco 49ers 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.

The sheet underneath doesn't carry the team's oval helmet logo — all ten tattoos are the maroon "49ERS" wordmark, in an old-style slab-serif face, and they're printed mirror-reversed, so the backwards lettering on the sheet 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, for whatever reason, 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." 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 1997 49ers

The "49ERS" wordmark on this sheet is the same style the club used from 1972 all the way to 2004, simplified down to tattoo size. It's worth noting the team's actual primary logo in 1997 was the red-and-gold "SF" oval, not this wordmark — Play-By-Play went with the lettering instead.

On the field, the 49ers went 13-3 in 1997 and finished first in the NFC West under head coach Steve Mariucci, with Edward J. DeBartolo Jr. as owner and Carmen Policy as president, playing out of 3Com Park at Candlestick. They beat the Minnesota Vikings 38-22 in the divisional round, then lost the NFC Championship Game 23-10 to the Green Bay Packers — the third year running the Packers ended San Francisco's season, and the 49ers' fifth trip to an NFC title game that decade, a run they wouldn't match again until 2011. Six 49ers made the Pro Bowl that year: quarterback Steve Young, guard Kevin Gogan, defensive tackle Dana Stubblefield, and linebackers Ken Norton Jr. and Lee Woodall, plus safety Merton Hanks. Jerry Rice missed 14 regular-season games in 1997 — one of only 17 he sat out across a 20-year career.

🎪 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. In 1996 it bought Ace Novelty, 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.