There's few people doing this (besides myself with the Touhou Project characters and the ones doing the IM@S girls). There's two methods of doing this:
1. Using it as part of the aircraft's skin. Although this would solve the problem of finding out the meshes involved, the trouble is that finding out the mapping (which goes where) is troublesome, and there is the risk of the art not turning out good (especially in skins below 1024x1024 in resolution).
2. Using it as a decal (as in, making it a .tga). Problem is the 3 decal limit per mesh, AND finding out which mesh is affected (I need THIRTEEN entries in the decal.ini for the wing of an F-4E, as seen in my thread). However, since you're using it as a nose art, it is way easier. Personally I would use this method, since the nose art would end up sharper compared to applying it directly onto the aircraft's skin (depending on the size of the decal itself), and you did not need to mess with the aircraft's skin. And change the decal at will.
One of my attempts:
For the F-4D, these is what I used:
[Decal029]
MeshName=fuselage_front
DecalLevel=0
DecalFacing=LEFT
FilenameFormat=F-4J_USAF/TACF-4D/D/flan
Position=7.75,-0.25
Rotation=0.0
Scale=1.00
DecalMaxLOD=3
[Decal030]
MeshName=fuselage_front
DecalLevel=0
DecalFacing=RIGHT
FilenameFormat=F-4J_USAF/TACF-4D/D/EOSD
Position=7.75,-0.25
Rotation=0.0
Scale=1.00
DecalMaxLOD=3