A new fingerprint matching method is proposed in this paper, with which two fingerprint skeleton images are matched directly. In this method, an associate table is introduced to describe the relation of a ridge with its neighbor ridges, so the whole ridge pattern can be easily handed. In addition, two unique similarity measures, one for ridge curves, another for ridge patterns, are defined with the elastic distortion taken into account. Experiment results on several databases demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.