How to limit drush tar-options="--exclude pattern matching to be specific and not recursive
I've found that you can use the current working directory, as the starting point, to force relative urls. It was a matter of getting the syntax correct.

For example if you have your site root in public_html, and you are in that location cd ~/public_html, you can use drush:

[user public_html]$ drush ard tar-options="--exclude=public_html/images" --destination=~/.backups/[date].tar.gz

The key is to navigate to that starting point root folder first.

For example, if your site root was in a subdirectory subdirectory/siteone,
 go to that location first cd ~/subdirectory/siteone
and then use drush:

[user siteone]$ drush ard tar-options="--exclude= siteone/images" --destination=~/.backups/[date].tar.gz