In Cakephp 1.1, if you want to display an image with a link, you’ll need to do something like this: echo $html->link( $html->image(‘myimage.jpg’), ‘/controller/action’, array(), null, false ) You need to tell CakePHP not to escape the content with last false statement. In CakePHP 1.2 you could do : echo $html->link( $html->image(‘myimage.jpg’), ‘/controller/action’, array(‘escape’ => [...]