Right now I have it stripping out the HTML, but theoretically you could indeed. I was thinking about that very thing since I frequent a number of Sci-Fi boards that use small rank images underneath the name.
One other possible enhancement would be to allow the use of images below the name and then tie it to a particular group so that a user could pick a particular group such as Klingon and it would display Klingon rank images beneath their name.
I gotta tell 'ya that the new version of this software makes these kind of "tweaks" a breeze. This one took me about 30 minutes. The longest part was just tracing the "path" of the files I'd need to change.