Not jQuery, as the question asks for, but natively (i.e., no libraries required) I think the better tool for the job is querySelector to get a single instance of a selector:
let el = document.querySelector('img');
console.log(el);
For all matching instances, use document.querySelectorAll(), or for those within another element you can chain as follows:
// Get some wrapper, with class="parentClassName"
let parentEl = document.querySelector('.parentClassName');
// Get all img tags within the parent element by parentEl variable
let childrenEls = parentEl.querySelectorAll('img');
Note the above is equivalent to:
let childrenEls = document.querySelector('.parentClassName').querySelectorAll('img');