At least he can get it up.

A man who got a tattoo on his penis is now left with a permanent semi-erection, according to an article in the latest issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

As MSNBC's The Body Odd reports, the 21-year-old Iranian man found himself between a rock and a hard place after he got a tattoo in Persian script reading "borow be salaamat" (good luck on your journeys), and the first initial of his girlfriend's last name ("M").

So what went wrong during the penis-pummeling procedure?

The article in Sexual Medicine explains that a tattoo artist crafted the tattoo using a handheld needle which resulted in "bleeding from deep penile tissue for several days complicating the tattooing."

MSNBC noted that the man had shunt surgery -- which drains excess fluid from inflamed areas of the body -- performed to correct the problem, but the procedure was unsuccessful.

Stiffly, err we mean strictly speaking, no surgery is necessary because, as the article notes, the man is capable of achieving a relatively normal erection and he's not in pain. So, the patient has decided not to pursue any more corrective measures.

Jezebel wonders if the man reached his decision after he "realized that the side effect of the tattoo was that his dick looks bigger all the time. But it probably took him so long to come to that realization due to all the blood draining from his head."

So what lessons can we learn from this poor guy's big mistake with his little buddy? Here's the article's author with the good wood, uh, word:

"Considering this case, we discourage penile tattooing."

