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Lil Xan Gets Disturbing Face Tattoo To Remember Mac Miller

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A 22-year-old rapper turned grief into a permanent, controversial tribute etched right above his eyebrow.

Two days after Mac Miller’s death rocked hip-hop, Lil Xan showed the world exactly how he was coping — with a needle and a mirror. The 22-year-old “Betrayed” rapper, born Diego Leanos, posted a photo to Instagram on September 9, 2018, revealing fresh face ink dedicated to the late Pittsburgh MC. The reaction split instantly between sympathy and ridicule, and Xan didn’t back down from either.

• Lil Xan debuted a tattoo above his right eyebrow reading “Memento Mori” — Latin for “remember you must die” — captioned “MOMENTO MORI 💔💔 miss you Mac, y’all can start hating me now.”
• He also revealed a second facial tattoo of dripping teardrops beneath his eye, crediting Yung Lean and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange as inspiration.
• After the tattoos drew heavy mockery online, Xan defended the decision publicly and then disabled comments on his Instagram account.

The Tattoo Itself

The “Memento Mori” script sits directly above Xan’s right eyebrow, impossible to miss in any photo or livestream going forward. Paired with the teardrop design under his eye, the two pieces read less like a tribute portrait and more like a permanent mood — a phrase meant to sit on his face every time he looks in a mirror. He didn’t soften the announcement, either; the caption leaned straight into the criticism he knew was coming.

“MOMENTO MORI 💔💔 miss you Mac, y’all can start hating me now.”

Defending The Ink

The backlash arrived fast, with commenters calling the placement reckless and the timing exploitative. Xan responded on Instagram without apologizing for either tattoo, framing the decision as entirely his own business. “I do this for me, I could care less if this makes me ugly because that’s what I was going for, Ugly is the new Beautiful, well not really but there’s some truth to that, I love you guys,” he wrote. Not long after, he shut off public comments altogether, cutting the conversation off rather than continuing to argue with strangers online.

Mac Miller’s Influence On Xan

The tattoo wasn’t a one-off gesture — it followed days of Xan speaking openly about how much Miller’s death gutted him. On the No Jumper podcast with Adam22, he called Miller his hero and said plainly, “When your hero dies f*** that s***, I don’t want to make music no more.” That’s a heavier statement than the usual celebrity tribute post, and it’s part of why the face tattoo read as genuine grief to some fans even as others called it a stunt. Like plenty of artists in the genre, Xan’s public persona has always run hot and unfiltered, something worth keeping in mind for anyone tracking how musicians who are nothing like they seem tend to process loss in the spotlight.

A Genre Still Mourning

Miller’s death at 26 hit an entire generation of rappers who’d come up admiring him, and Xan was far from alone in publicly grieving that week. Hip-hop has absorbed more than its share of early losses in recent years, a pattern covered in pieces like tragic details about Eminem, and Miller’s passing added another name to that list almost overnight. For Xan specifically, the tattoo became the most visible, most permanent marker of that week — one he can’t take off, delete, or walk back the way he did his Instagram comments.

Xan turned off the comments, but he didn’t cover the ink. Nearly a week after Miller’s death, “Memento Mori” is still sitting above his eyebrow, and by his own account, that was always the point.