@Nikos C. gives you useful advice, but I think your main problem was that you didn't use the correct link to the resource.
In your code, you have:
QPixmap pixmap = QPixmap ("://my_image.png");
but, according to the documentation, it should be
QPixmap pixmap = QPixmap (":/my_image.png");
or you can give aliases to your resources, and use those instead.