A 21-year-old man in Iran came to a urology clinic with a problem he had been living with for three months: his penis had been partially rigid the entire time. The cause, his doctors concluded, was a tattoo.
The case, reported in The Journal of Sexual Medicine by physicians at Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences, was described by its authors at the time as the first reported case of nonischemic priapism following penile tattooing. Published in 2012, it resurfaced in May 2025 in Live Science's "Diagnostic Dilemma" series.
