The question posed to fans last month at the draft party inside U.S. Bank Stadium was simple.
Would you be willing to actually bleed purple and gold?
The answer was on full display this week when the Vikings released their 2025-26 schedule with a 1 minute, 47 second video, featuring a number of fans getting tattooed with caricatures of each opponent for next season.
Yes, the body art was 100 percent real, and 100 percent permanent, courtesy of the folks at Green River Tattoo in Minneapolis.
“We have fearlessly loyal fans,” said Heather Larsen, senior director of digital marketing and content strategy for the Vikings. “It wasn’t hard for us to get a lot of people interested. We had a lot of great enthusiasm and willingness to be a part of it. We just had to narrow it down to who wanted which tattoo and where they wanted it on their body.”
The process started a couple of months ago when different members of the Vikings first sat down to think of creative ways to release their schedule. No longer does a simple post on social media suffice, not when it’s become an annual competition across the NFL to see which team can go the most viral.
“We like to bring in a lot of our creative department,” said Laney Austin, senior manager of social media and email for the Vikings. “It’s sort of all hands on deck for us.”
Some of the most notable ideas that the Vikings have used in the past to release their schedule include having Hall of Fame defensive tackle John Randle featured prominently on screen, as well as flying a drone throughout TCO Performance Center.
The concept of convincing fans to get tattoos this time around came via senior art manager Jackie Ramacher, who shared it with the group after attending an annual conference in Austin, Texas.
“It came up during a session I was in,” Ramacher said. “I was like, ‘Wait. We have such dedicated fans. Would they be willing to do that for us?’ ”
As soon as everybody with the Vikings was onboard with the plan, Ramacher and producer Alex Miller reached out to Green River Tattoo and set up a meeting with owners Collin Rigsby and Steven Skorjanec.
“It was really important for us to highlight a local tattoo artist and kind of let them run with it,” Ramacher said. “We wanted it to be authentic to the tattoo artist themselves.”
The biggest challenge was the fact that the tattoos were going to be highlighting each opponent. Though the Vikings could have gone out of their way to try to be funny, they decided the best way to go about it was to keep the focus on what was important to them.
“We wanted it to be more about highlighting our fans,” Ramacher said. “Just showing how dedicated they were to us.”
After working with Green River Tattoo to figure out what the tattoos were going to look like — the designs were at least partially related to the Vikings in some way, shape, or form — the next step was finding enough canvases to work on.
The initial ask was to various season ticket holders, which provided a good base, and the rest came from the draft party where they interviewed fans on camera to gauge their interest.
The response was overwhelmingly positive as pretty much everybody involved proved they were, indeed, willing to actually bleed purple and gold.
“I feel like something that added to it was that they got to be a part of our story,” Miller said. “That sort of helped sell it to a lot of people.”
Everything went down at Green River Tattoo on May 6. More than a dozen fans showed up, including Daniels Hastings, who recently appeared on the Netflix series Love Is Blind, and agreed to get a lip tattoo for the occasion.
A week and a half later, after a lot more work on the backend, the Vikings released their schedule, which was extremely rewarding as it represented the culmination of so many people working together toward a common goal.
As proud as everybody was of the final product, the gratification for some people didn’t come until roughly 12 hours later. That’s because the Vikings also decided to put on a flash event at Green River Tattoo the following day offering free tattoos in conjunction with them releasing their schedule.
“We were like, ‘Are people actually going to show up?’ ” said Vikings creative director Alicia Dreyer. “As soon as we got to Green River Tattoo and saw the long line of people and how excited they were then it was like, ‘OK. This is amazing. We did something here.’ ”
That moment made everything worth it.
“We loved seeing the connection with the community,” Ramacher said. “Maybe nationally this video wasn’t the most viral. That’s OK. We feel like locally we made an impact and that’s so much more meaningful.”
Related Articles
Here’s a game-by-game breakdown of the Vikings schedule
Source: Vikings agree to terms with rookie left guard Donovan Jackson
Here’s a look at the Vikings schedule for next season
Cheers! Vikings will play back-to-back in Dublin and London this fall
Now with the Vikings, Max Brosmer is right where he’s supposed to be
Leave a Reply