:P /images/imagename.jpg was an example. you need to see what your documentRoot is set to, then everything will be relative to that. So, for example, if your documentRoot is /var/www/ and you've created a directory called images in /var/www, then the html would be <table background="/images/image.jpg or whatever the image name is. No other configuration is necessary.
By default, apache uses <installdirectory>/htdocs on windows and /var/www on *nix.