How to proxy/hide the original link with a token?

Question

PHP

There is a service API link that contains an open token in the parameter, the link itself leads to an image (2-3 mb).

Naturally, it would be wrong to directly transfer the link to img src, but the display speed will be instantaneous.

I tried to take the picture on the server and give it away:

'data:image/jpg;base64,' . base64_encode(file_get_contents($link)),

But this is long, the page is not displayed until the image is loaded.

Okay, then I did it through Ajax, gave an empty page and made a request from it to get a picture (like a lazyload).
But it also turned out to be long + resource-intensive.

Therefore, the question arose, is it possible to somehow hide the link with the token behind another link in order to display the image directly in the browser?