Javascript image tooltip (need help with image relative path syntax)
Permalink"{tooltips[0]=["picsamddpcs/tape/1inch.JPG"];"

The problem is you can only do this in PHP files, not javascript files. To make php data available to javascript, you must output a javascript variable in your theme template file, for example:
<script type="text/javascript"> var tooltip_image_path = '<?php echo $this->getThemePath(); ?>/picsamddpcs/'; </script>
Now your javascript should have access to that tooltip_image_path variable. If, for example, that little snippet of code you pasted is how it gets the image paths, you would change that to:
tooltips[0]=[tootip_image_path + 'tape/1inch.JPG'];
(not sure what that extra curly brace is -- please use my code above as a possible example showing how to use the variable, not as a directly-pasteable solution).
Hope that helps.
James