How to give image instead of text in pager?
See How to change text-links to image links in the pager.
By using the theme_image() function Drupal should nicely format the &lt;img&gt; tag, and output it to your theme. Well, this works, but unfortunately somewhere in this theme_pager() process a l() is telling Drupal to only output plain text here.

The trick here is not to rewrite your whole pager functions. Have a look at theme_pager_link(); this function is building all the links that are used by the pager functions. When you look closer to the l() formatting the output is done using the following code:

return l($text, $_GET['q'], array('attributes' =&gt; $attributes, 'query' =&gt; count($query) ? implode('&amp;', $query) : NULL));


You'll see the options aren't setting the HTML output. So I placed the whole function in my template.php (changing theme_pager_link() to `landrush_pager_lin()k) with a different output:

return l($text, $_GET['q'], array('attributes' =&gt; $attributes, 'html' =&gt; TRUE, 'query' =&gt; count($query) ? implode('&amp;', $query) : NULL));


Note 'html' =&gt; TRUE.

Now l() is allowing me to print HTML tags (images!) within the pager function.