This paper proposes a skeleton-based hierarchical shape description scheme, called a skeleton tree, for accurate shape-based image retrieval. A skeleton tree represents an object shape as a hierarchical tree where high-level nodes describe parts of coarse trunk regions and low-level nodes describe fine details of boundary regions. Each node refines the shape of its parent node. Most of the noise disturbances are limited to bottom level nodes and the boundary noise is reduced by decreasing weights on the bottom levels. The similarity of two skeleton trees is computed by considering the best match of a skeleton tree to a sub-tree of another skeleton tree. The proposed method uses a hybrid similarity measure by employing both Fourier descriptors and moment invariants in computing the similarity of two skeleton trees. Several experimental results are presented demonstrating the validity of the skeleton tree scheme for the shape description and indexing.