In this paper, we examined the operating principle of a passive tag antenna for RFID system in UHF band. Based on the study, we proposed a novel RFID tag antenna which adopts the inductively coupled feeding structure to match antenna impedance to a capacitively loaded commercial tag chip. The proposed tag antenna consists of microstrip lines on a thin PET substrate for low-cost fabrication. The detail structure of the tag antenna were optimized using a full electromagnetic wave simulator of IE3D in conjunction with a Pareto genetic algorithm, and the size of the tag antenna can be reduced up to kr=0.27(2 cm2). We built some sample antennas and measured the antenna characteristics such as a return loss, an efficiency, and radiation patterns. The readable range of the tag antenna with a commercial RFID system showed about 1 to 3 m.