The phrase "a recurring image" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe an image or motif that appears multiple times within a work of art, literature, or other forms of media.
Example: "In the novel, a recurring image of the ocean symbolizes the characters' longing for freedom."
Alternatives: "a repeated motif" or "a recurring motif".
The queen is a recurring image throughout this prose-poem.
Fitzsimons was haunted by a recurring image, Liz says.
The opening and closing of empty glass jars was a recurring image in both films.
The tipsy wage-earner taking the last train home is a recurring image in modern Japan.
(The test, which we pass or fail, is a recurring image in Coetzee).
A recurring image shows her watching them sleep, as though burning a new memory as a hedge against their mortality.
The voices vary throughout this book's six highly speculative sequences (the first five of which conclude with shorter, surer poems identically entitled "Love's Letter"), yet again and again they call from their spectral airiness a single recurring image, an elemental configuration of man, woman and child.
Paula Hawkins's The Girl on the Train, crime fiction's breakout success of 2015, offers up a similarly potent primal moment: the recurring image of a woman outside looking in, or a woman inside looking out, through train windows, through patio doors, down into the dank mouth of an underpass.
Tawni O'Dell's potent first novel, BACK ROADS (Viking, $24.95), features the recurring image of a rusty pipe stuck in a concrete block, the remnant of the satellite dish that 19-year-old Harley Altmyer can no longer afford, now that his mother is in jail for killing his dad.
The tale of politics and dislocation is loosely connected by the recurring image of a partridge trap made of sticks, a metaphor, perhaps, for the refugee's predicament.
Grounded by the grainy recurring image of a cell rapidly dividing, "Annihilation" is itself a fluid exercise in genetic mutation: It begins with scenes from a marriage, then quickly evolves into a wilderness adventure, an environmental horror flick and a striking depiction of physical and psychological entropy (emphasis on the "trippy").
