Inline list with images and no content?

I have been scratching my head over this a while now and could use some advise. I'm trying to create a list where i would like a custom graphic as a bullet, this seems to be impossible with inline lists so i resort to try and use a background image but now comes my second problem. When the images are in place I would like to hide the text in the list so that the list is displayed only with the images, my aprocach to this was to set the display to none in the spans that reside within the li's, this however gave the result that the entire list dissapeared. Has anyone tried to make an inline list where the only thing visable is images, and where not using img-tags in the code but just css? (also the list does not semm to respond well to padding, any clues?)Please advice. BR / Fredrik