I'm not sure if this can be treated as an answer or a "hack".

But if you want Nomad to use docker image that is already present on a node the image MUST NOT be tagged latest.

For testing I tag my images as IMAGE:local. This way Nomad uses it if present, pulls it from remote if not.

Nomad now supports tar docker images.

here is an example

artifact {
  source = "http://path.to/redis.tar"
}
config {
  load = "redis.tar"
  image = "redis"
}

However, the tar size may be too large to be resiliently transport and provisioned.

Looking at Nomad's source code here and here, it seems that using machine local images is not supported. That would make sense, as in a cluster environment with several nodes, the scheduler needs to be able to get the image irrespective of which machine the job is allocated to.

(One possible workaround would be to run a registry service within the Nomad cluster, and use whichever storage backend is most convenient for you)