How to use an image styled by ImageCache Actions as background for a node?
I would create some dynamic CSS on the fly and add it to the head of the document.

$styled_image_path = image_style_url('style_name', $image_path);

$css = '
.node {
  background-image: url(' . $styled_image_path . ');
}
';

drupal_add_css($css, array('type' =&gt; 'inline'));


You can add this to a hook_preprocess_node() to check for a specific node before adding to the page.