A small black rat stands in front of a wall, holding a huge paintbrush in its paws. It has just finished its work, an outline of a red heart on the wall. Paint runs down from the heart.

All the tension in the piece sits in that dripping paint. From a distance, the scene looks romantic, a declaration of love, a heart left on a wall. Up close, the dripping red looks less like fresh paint and more like blood. The heart is not loving, it is bleeding.

The title completes this reading. In English, “love rat” is a term for someone who cheats, who runs more than one relationship at once. Banksy takes the phrase back to its literal meaning and gives us an actual rat. The artist’s own line when introducing the print points the same way: the ideal gift for a cheating partner.

The rat figure is especially meaningful here. Banksy’s rat is the city’s written off resident, unloved and driven out, the figure closest to the artist’s own position. Here that figure becomes the author of a declaration of love, but the declaration itself wounds. Banksy’s images of love are almost never single layered. In Girl With Balloon it is the balloon slipping away, in Love Is In The Air it is the protester throwing flowers, and here it is the drips beneath the heart.