Here, made from some images found on the 'Net, is a moderately successful traditional "chick in chainmail" to be used as a replacement tile for the single Valkerie tile in usual tile sets for NetHack. The user is expected to insert the tile into the tile set him/herself. The tiles are in PNG format, square pixel sizes 16, 24, 32, 48, 56, 64, 72, 96, 128, 256, 512, 1024 (the last three probably useless except for starting points from which to scale to other sizes) and fetchable as this zipfile ValkInChainMailBikiniTileSet.zip with the usual right-click "save link as" mechanisms.

Comments about the image.

• According to Norse legend, the hammer made for Loki to give to Thor was solid gold, and by Loki's trickery, short of handle. The usual Mjollnir images of war hammers with short or long wooden handles and blocky iron heads thus rather miss the mark. I was quite happy to find one Mjollnir image that looked obviously metallic and golden, so that's what this Valkerie is weilding.
• The sword image was labeled Excaliber in the original image, so presume that's what she's carrying.
• In NetHack, the Valkerie starts off with a small shield. I omitted it here to show off more of the woman, uselessly armored near-nakedness being the whole point of the "chick in chainmail" tradition, and of the many objections to such depictions.
• This image doesn't scale wonderfully well, so the smaller tiles have some "issues"; the grey chainmail skirt blends into the grey dungeon floor, and you end up seeing a one legged Valkerie. The tattoos on the model's arm turn into grey areas that seem to cut off her arm in smaller tiles. Too, the figures in the smaller tiles don't resemble much of anything but blobs. To do this job correctly, each tile should be separately drawn. Since I have no artistic talent, and only worked from photos or other artist's work, I can't do that for you. Oops.
• Yes, you can see right through that chainmail skirt, and no, the model isn't wearing any cloth garments. Stop squinting, guys.
• Best I can tell, that sword is just slung through the back strap of the halter top. Luckily, the strap is metal, so it should last for a while.
• This original image has some pretty bad jaggies from my work cutting away the original background. Luckily, this gets anti-aliased away as the image size is reduced.

Here's the uselessly largest tile, pulled out to show an example image.

ValkInChainMailBikiniTile_1024x1024.png

This page, maintained by
Kent Paul Dolan
xanthian@well.com ,  
was last updated
20060607.