Bomb Love (Bomb Hugger)

A girl, a bomb, a wall

The image is simple enough to read from across a street. A young girl wraps her arms around a large bomb, the way a child would cling to a favorite toy. There is no slogan. The joke, and the horror, is in the gesture itself: something built to destroy is being loved.

Sources disagree on exactly where the girl first appeared. One catalogue of Banksy's work places an early mural in Bristol in 1998 and records a version on a concrete pillar in Hamburg's Steinwergpassage in 2002. Other accounts say the black-and-white stencil first showed up in east London in 2001, then in Brighton and Hamburg around 2003. What is not in dispute is that the motif moved quickly from the street into Banksy's books, including Wall and Piece (2005), and onto canvas and board.

By 2002 Banksy was painting unique versions of the image on canvas, some on a soft pink ground, and showing them in exhibitions including Santa's Ghetto in London and Existencilism in Los Angeles. One of those paintings sold at auction in London in 2007 for £31,200.

The march against the war

Bomb Love belongs to the months when Britain was preparing to join the invasion of Iraq. On February 15, 2003, coordinated protests took place in more than 600 cities in over 60 countries. Researchers estimate six to ten million people marched worldwide, which has been described as the largest protest event in history. In London, police counted more than 750,000 people; the BBC put the figure near one million. Marchers came by coach from 250 British towns and cities and converged on Hyde Park.

Banksy and his circle made hand-sprayed cardboard placards for the protests using the Bomb Hugger, along with other stencils such as Happy Chopper and Grin Reaper. An auction listing for one surviving placard states that it was made for the February 15 demonstration and that many of these objects were destroyed or thrown away afterward, because Banksy was not yet famous. A local newspaper photograph from March 24, 2003, shows an 18-year-old protester in Basingstoke holding a Bomb Hugger placard with the word NO sprayed in red above the girl's head.

The marches did not stop the war. The U.S.-led invasion began on March 20, 2003. The image outlived the moment and became one of the best-known symbols of that anti-war movement.

The pink print

The screenprint was published by Pictures on Walls, the London print shop that put Banksy's images into editions in the early 2000s. Against a vivid bubblegum-pink background, the girl and her bomb stay in stark black and white. The edition was split three ways: 150 impressions signed and numbered, 600 unsigned, and a run of signed artist's proofs. One catalogue counts 44 signed proofs.

Dating is slightly untidy. The print is usually called a 2003 work, but some sources give the publication year as 2004, and at least one signed impression, number 90/150, is signed and dated '04' and catalogued as 2003-4. A 2023 auction listing for impression 48/150 describes it as signed in black ink, dated and numbered; a Banksy catalogue describes the signature as pencil. Buyers should read the inscription on the sheet in front of them rather than assume.

Today, certificates come from Pest Control Office, the body Banksy set up to authenticate his work. The 90/150 impression sold in London in June 2025 was offered with a note that Pest Control had authenticated it and would issue a new certificate.

From £10,250 to £132,660 and back

The signed edition is thin on the ground at auction. A Banksy market tracker counts only 11 qualifying sales of standard signed impressions since 2018, against 59 for the unsigned version. Earlier results show how modest the starting point was: a signed impression sold in London in March 2012 for £10,250 (about $16,310), and one in June 2014 brought just £6,875.

Then came the Banksy boom of 2020 and 2021. An impression sold in London in October 2020 for £132,660 with fees, still the auction record for the signed edition, and four more signed impressions sold for more than $120,000 each in 2021, including one in Hong Kong.

Prices have since come back down. Impression 47/150 made £63,000 in March 2023. In 2025, number 90/150 sold in London for £23,040 and number 24/150 for £44,450. The latest result on record, number 13/150, sold in an online sale on September 24, 2026, for £64,000, about $85,480. The tracker notes that the most recent results sit at roughly a third of the 2020 peak.

Artist's proofs trade separately. AP/39 set the proof record at £46,900 in December 2024, and AP/31 sold for £39,420 in March 2026. The unsigned edition peaked at £75,860 at a sale in Japan in April 2022, a result the tracker calls a speculative outlier.

How to read one

A signed impression should carry Banksy's signature and a number out of 150 at lower right; unsigned sheets are numbered out of 600. Some impressions carry the publisher's blindstamp and some do not, so its absence alone does not condemn a sheet. The sheet measures about 70 by 50 centimeters.

The motif has also been widely reproduced, as canvases, posters and protest-placard copies made after Banksy. A 2003 placard offered in Germany was catalogued as 'in the style of' Banksy. Only Pest Control can authenticate a Banksy, which is why the certificate matters as much as the paper.

The numbers

Medium

Screenprint in colors on wove paper

Dimensions

Sheet about 70 x 50 cm (27 1/2 x 19 3/4 in); 695 x 495 mm on 90/150

Edition size

150 signed; 600 unsigned; signed artist's proofs (44 per one catalogue)

Inscriptions

Signed and numbered at lower right; some signed sheets dated '03' or '04'; blindstamp on some impressions

Publisher

Pictures on Walls, London

Signed auction sales since 2018

11 qualifying results, per one market tracker

Timeline

1. 1998

   One Banksy catalogue dates the first Bomb Hugger mural to Bristol; other accounts place the first stencil in east London in 2001.

2. 2002

   A version is painted on a concrete pillar in Hamburg's Steinwergpassage. Unique paintings of the image are shown at Santa's Ghetto in London and Existencilism in Los Angeles.

3. Feb 15, 2003

   Hand-sprayed Bomb Hugger placards are made for the anti-Iraq war march in London.

4. Mar 24, 2003

   A protester in Basingstoke is photographed holding a Bomb Hugger placard.

5. 2003

   Pictures on Walls publishes the pink screenprint: 150 signed, 600 unsigned. Some sources give 2004.

6. 2005

   The image appears in Banksy's book Wall and Piece.

7. 2007

   A Bomb Hugger painting sells at auction in London for £31,200.

8. Mar 29, 2012

   Signed impression 44/150 sells in London for £10,250.

9. Dec 12, 2017

   Signed impression 11/150 sells in New York for $37,520.

10. Oct 27, 2020

    A signed impression sets the edition's auction record: £132,660 with fees.

11. Apr 1, 2021

    Impression 139/150 sells for £118,750, about $163,875.

12. Apr 2022

    An unsigned impression sells in Japan for £75,860, the unsigned record.

13. Dec 3, 2024

    Artist's proof AP/39 sets the proof record at £46,900.

14. Jun 25, 2025

    Impression 90/150, dated '04', sells in London for £23,040.

15. Sep 24, 2026

    Impression 13/150 sells online for £64,000, about $85,480.

The world in 2003

• Feb 1, 2003

  Space Shuttle Columbia breaks apart on reentry, killing its seven astronauts.

• Feb 15, 2003

  Between six and ten million people protest the coming Iraq war in more than 600 cities.

• Mar 20, 2003

  The U.S.-led coalition invades Iraq.

• May 1, 2003

  President George W. Bush declares the end of major combat operations in Iraq.

• 2003

  The SARS epidemic, centered in Guangdong and Hong Kong, runs for several months.

• Aug 19, 2003

  A bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad kills UN envoy Sérgio Vieira de Mello.

• Dec 26, 2003

  An earthquake destroys the Iranian city of Bam, killing about 30,000 people.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, Bomb Love (Bomb Hugger) is number 67 of 100 in the art entries of the FLOAT 100. 88 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (62 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• Many of the original Bomb Hugger protest placards were simply thrown away after the February 2003 march, because Banksy was not yet famous.
• A signed impression sold for £6,875 in 2014. Six years later another sold for £132,660.
• The unsigned edition is four times larger than the signed one, yet an unsigned sheet once sold for £75,860, more than several signed impressions have brought.
• The girl has also been painted on a pillar in Hamburg, a long way from Banksy's Bristol roots.
• Some signed impressions are dated '04' even though the print is generally called a 2003 work.