A novel approach for texture image retrieval is proposed by using a new set of two-dimensional (2-D) rotated wavelet filters (RWF) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) jointly. A new set of 2-D rotated wavelet improves characterization of diagonally oriented textures. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method improves retrieval rate from 70.09% to 78.44% on database D1, and from 75.62% to 80.78% on database D2, compared with the traditional DWT based approach. The proposed method also retains comparable levels of computational complexity.