I think you are going about this wrong. Are you generating an image tag dynamically? When you are tagging the image, make sure that you generate the tag deterministically based on information that is available to gitlab when the pipeline is created.

So for example, you could use the tag foo:$PIPELINE_ID instead of foo:$random

This was the only way I could create dynamic terraform pipelines which changed depending on a plan output.

I'm sure could use it to achieve what you've described.

You might also want to look into Downstream Pipelines.