Penis veins: smooth or veiny

Some cocks are smooth, others carry a thick vein up the top and a map of branches. Here is what those veins are, why they show and when one is a problem

Some cocks are smooth as a marble statue. Others look like a river delta, with a thick blue vein running up the top and a network of smaller ones branching off. Both are normal, both can belong to the same man on different days, and neither says anything about how well the thing works.

Veins are also the trait where the gap between interest and research is widest. Plenty of men care about them, for or against. Science has looked at penile veins almost only to fix erections, and has never once counted how many men have visible ones.

Three looks

The drawings show the same cock three ways. What changes is only how much of the plumbing shows through the skin.

What you are looking at

The vein you can see is the superficial dorsal vein. It runs along the top of the shaft just under the skin and drains blood from the skin and the foreskin into the veins of the groin. Under a tough layer of tissue below it lies the deep dorsal vein, which drains the erectile tissue itself. You never see that one, but it does the important work of an erection, when its outflow is squeezed so that blood stays in.

The textbook picture is tidier than the real thing. When Russian anatomists injected and X-rayed the penile veins of 54 adult men, they found the layout very variable: both the superficial and the deep dorsal vein could be single or double, joined by a network of connecting branches that was densest at the base. A Taiwanese team dissecting 21 bodies under a microscope found more veins than the books described, including a vein along each erectile chamber all the way to the head in 19 of them, and pairs of small veins next to the arteries in all 21. In short, everyone has a slightly different map.

Notice why those anatomists were looking. The Taiwanese study began with 37 men whose erection problems had come back after an operation to strip away leaking veins: on their X-rays, veins that should no longer exist were still carrying blood. Doctors map penile veins because, in some men, blood drains out too fast for an erection to last. Whether the veins on top look impressive has never been on their list.

Why some show and some do not

No study has measured vein visibility, so what follows is anatomy, not statistics. The superficial veins sit just under thin skin, so anything that brings them closer to the surface or fills them up makes them show more.

• Erection. More blood flows in and the way out is partly squeezed, so the veins fill and stand out. Many men are smooth soft and veiny hard.
• Warmth. Heat widens surface veins; cold shrinks them. The same cock looks different after a hot shower and after a swim.
• Thin skin and little fat. Lean men tend to show veins everywhere, the cock included.
• Pale skin. Blue lines show more clearly through light skin than through darker skin.
• Your own map. With that much variation in how the veins are laid out, some men simply have a bigger vein running closer to the surface.

Popular pages add that veins get more visible with age or with working out. Both are plausible for the same reasons, thinner skin and less fat, but neither has been measured on the penis.

Do gay men like them?

There is no study on it. Not one. Taste in veins, as far as research is concerned, is a blank page, and it will probably stay one, since vein visibility is not a question anyone funds. What is clear from experience is that tastes split: for some men a vein along the top is the most masculine detail of a cock, for others smooth is the ideal. Both groups are right about their own preferences, which is all a preference needs to be.

When a vein is a problem

Rarely, but it happens. The superficial dorsal vein can clot, turning into a firm, sometimes painful cord along the top of the shaft. Doctors call it penile Mondor disease. In a series of 30 men with it, the average age was 34, a third had had long sessions of sex just before, and all were treated without surgery, with no lasting change to the shape of the cock or to erections.

The same vein can also tear during sex, causing swelling and a bruise that looks alarming enough to be mistaken for a penile fracture.

See a doctor if a vein turns into a hard, painful cord, or if the cock swells and bruises after sex. Visible veins that are soft, painless and have always been there are just how you are built.