override views-view-fields.tpl.php in custom module
You need to define a theme hook for the field-template in your module and place a template in custom_module/theme/your-custom-template.tpl:

/**
* Implementation of hook_theme().
*/
function custom_module_theme($existing) {
  return array(
    'views_view_field__view_name__field_name' =&gt; array(
    'arguments' =&gt; array('view' =&gt; NULL, 'field' =&gt; NULL, 'row' =&gt; NULL),
    'template' =&gt; 'your-custom-template',
    'original hook' =&gt; 'views_view_field',
    'path' =&gt; drupal_get_path('module', 'custom_module') . '/theme',
   ),
  );
}


To narrow down which field-templates you want to replace you can name your return key to:


views_view_field__view_name: Override all field templates of the view named "view_name"
views_view_field__view_name__field_name: Override only this specific field


This example is taken from grayside.org