I always have a few candles lit as well when working with .Net code, but they are part of the sacrifice ritual to Bill Gates in the hopes of getting the code to work right.
It's an illustration by sci-fi artist David Mattingly(the illustration above is the same one as in my signature, but larger...) of sci-fi heroine Honor Harrington and her treecat Nimitz. Harrington is the main character in David Weber's Honorverse series of military sci-fi novels and anthologies. Her character is based off of three individuals(2 real-life and 1 fictional); Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson and Admiral Thomas Cochrane, along with C.S. Forester's fictional character of Horatio Hornblower.
As to the illustration....I thought it looked pretty interesting, so I thought I'd add it to my signature.