Free Pentagram Grid Generator
Draw an exact pentagram instantly with our 100% free grid generator. Set the five-pointed star with its pentagon, inner golden pentagon and boundary circle, each crossing cutting its chord at phi, over any image, then export SVG or 600 DPI in seconds. No signup, no downloads needed. Trusted by 60,000+ artists worldwide.
Five points, and phi throughout
A five-pointed star drawn in one unbroken line inside a regular pentagon. Every segment stands to the next in the golden ratio, which makes the pentagram the most direct geometric expression of phi there is.
5 controls, not a fixed picture
Set size and construction step, toggle outer pentagon, inner golden pentagon and boundary circle. Every one is live on the canvas.
Stacks with sacred geometry & pattern
Overlays combine, each carrying its own transform, so this one can sit under or over flower of life, sri yantra and metatron’s cube, and 15 more in the same set.
Golden ratios that survive scaling
The proportions are geometric, so they hold exactly at any export size. SVG for paths; PNG, JPG or PDF up to 600 DPI.
| Ctrl + Z | Undo |
| Ctrl + Y | Redo |
| Esc | Deselect overlay |
| Alt + drag | Free positioning (no snap) |
| Ctrl + scroll | Zoom canvas |
| Ctrl + P | |
| ? | Show this help |
Five points on a circle, joined every other one. Every crossing cuts its chord in the golden ratio, and the pentagon they enclose is 1/φ² of the circle — none of which survives drawing it freehand.
The pentagram generator draws one of the 82 composition overlays in Grid Maker Pro, and the rest stack on the same image.
- 72° apart
- Inner pentagon 0.382
- SVG + 600 DPI export
- Nothing uploaded
What is a pentagram?
The pentagram generator is a free browser tool that draws the exact five-pointed star over any image or blank canvas. Five points sit 72° apart on a circle and each is joined to the two points it does not neighbour, producing five chords that cross ten times. Those crossings are where the geometry lives: each chord is cut into three parts in the ratio φ : 1 : φ, and the small pentagon the crossings enclose has a circumradius of exactly 1/φ² — 0.382 — of the outer one. The outer pentagon, the inner pentagon and the boundary circle can each be shown or hidden.
How to draw an exact pentagram
Five points on one circle and the star they make, with the outer pentagon and the inner golden pentagon available on the same construction.
Open the pentagram
The pentagram opens with its five points already 72° apart, before you adjust anything, so the crossings carry their true golden proportions from the first frame.
JPG · PNG · GIF · WEBP
Show the parts you need
Turn the outer pentagon on when you are building a shape rather than a star, the inner pentagon when you want the recursion, and the boundary circle when the figure has to sit inside something.
Size · Outer pentagon · Inner golden pentagon
Place it, then export
Drag, scale and rotate it over your artwork or onto a blank sheet at your paper size. Export SVG for a plotter or cutter, or a raster at up to 600 DPI.
PNG · JPG · PDF · SVG · up to 600 DPI
Three steps, about a minute. No signup, no upload.
What the Pentagram Generator does
Five points, exactly 72° apart
By eye, a five-pointed star is nearly always slightly irregular, and the irregularity concentrates in the crossings. Placed by construction, every angle is 72° and every proportion that follows is exact.
φ at every crossing
Each chord is cut into three segments in the ratio φ : 1 : φ. That is not a decorative claim — it is measurable on the figure, and it is why the pentagram was the Pythagorean emblem long before anyone called the ratio golden.
The inner pentagon, at 0.382
The crossings enclose a smaller pentagon whose circumradius is 1/φ² of the outer — 0.38197. Inscribe a star in it and the whole figure repeats, which is the recursion the pentagram is really about.
Every part optional
Star alone, star plus pentagon, the full nested figure, with or without the circle. A carved or cut version usually wants fewer lines than a study of the geometry does.
Over your own work
It has its own transform, so you can rotate the star onto an object in a photograph, or scale it into a panel you are laying out, without moving what is underneath.
Vector out, at real size
SVG export gives true straight lines for cutting, plotting or engraving. Raster export is sized from the paper format and DPI you choose, up to 600.
Pentagram examples: four ways the figure reads
Pentagram vs a downloaded star graphic vs drawing it with compass and straightedge
| Option | Points exactly 72° apart | Inner pentagon at 1/φ² | Vector export | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grid Maker Prothis tool | Yesby construction | Yesdrawn at 0.38197 | SVG + raster to 600 DPI | Free |
| A downloaded star graphic | Usually, unknown provenance | Rarely included | Sometimes | Free or paid |
| Drawing it with compass and straightedge | Yesif the construction is followed | By construction | No | Time |
| A drawing program's star tool | Yes | No | Yes | Subscription |
Who a pentagram is for: work that needs five-fold symmetry
How a pentagram works — Five chords, ten crossings, and the ratio that falls out of them
The pentagram is the oldest of the 82 composition overlays with a mathematical secret in it, and the secret is not mystical: every regular five-pointed star produces the golden ratio four separate times, intended or not. Here is where, and why drawing it by eye loses all of it.
The construction is one instruction. Mark five points equally spaced around a circle — 72° apart — and join each one to the two points it does not neighbour. Five chords, drawn without lifting the pen, and the star closes on itself. That single-stroke property is why it turns up as a signature, a seal and a charm across unrelated cultures.
What makes it mathematically interesting is what the chords do to each other. Each of the five is crossed twice, and the two crossings divide it into three segments whose lengths are in the ratio φ : 1 : φ. Measure the figure the overlay draws and the outer segments are 0.72654 of the radius while the middle one is 0.44903 — a ratio of 1.61803.
You cannot draw a regular pentagram without drawing the golden ratio. That is the whole of its reputation, and it is true.
The inner pentagon, and the recursion
The ten crossings are the vertices of a smaller regular pentagon, rotated 36° from the outer one. Its circumradius is exactly 1/φ² of the original — 0.38197 — and the overlay draws it at precisely that value rather than at an eyeballed fraction.
Inscribe a pentagram in that pentagon and you get a smaller one still, at 0.38197 of 0.38197, and so on without limit. This is the figure's real content: it is a self-similar construction whose scaling factor is a power of φ, which puts it in the same family as the golden rectangle and the golden spiral rather than in the same family as a decorative star.
Why the Pythagoreans cared, and what is over-claimed
The pentagram was the emblem of the Pythagorean school, and the reason is geometric rather than symbolic: the ratio inside it is incommensurable. The diagonal and the side of a regular pentagon cannot both be whole multiples of any common unit, and the pentagram makes that visible — the recursion never terminates, so no common measure exists.
That mattered enormously to a school whose founding position was that everything is number, meaning whole-number ratio. The pentagram is one of the two classical demonstrations that the position is wrong, alongside the diagonal of a square. Mario Livio reviews what the record actually supports in The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number (Broadway Books, 2002): the crisis the legends describe is tradition rather than documentation, while the figure's demonstration of incommensurability is a matter of geometry and holds regardless.
What is over-claimed is nearly everything after that. The pentagram's later associations — protective, occult, elemental — are cultural rather than geometric, and reading them back into the Pythagorean use is anachronism. Use the figure because the proportions in it are real and useful, which they are. Every one of the sacred-geometry category is treated the same way here: the construction documented, the attributions kept separate from it.
Point up, point down, and rotation
The overlay places the first point at the top, so the star is point-up by default. Turning it is a rotation like any other, using the overlay's own transform — there is nothing structurally different about an inverted pentagram, and the geometry is identical either way.
The distinction is a matter of convention and context, and it is recent and specific rather than ancient and universal: the reading of the point-down star as sinister was popularised by the 19th-century occultist Éliphas Lévi and, in the 20th century, by Anton LaVey. For most of the figure's history it stood for health and protection. If you are designing something where the orientation carries meaning for your audience, decide it deliberately; the construction has no opinion.
Using it as a construction rather than a symbol
The pentagon is the more useful half for construction work. Turn the star off and you have a regular pentagon at an exact size, which is a shape that is genuinely awkward to construct by hand and turns up constantly in tiling, in badge and seal design, and in anything that needs five-fold symmetry.
The star and pentagon together give you a construction sheet: the pentagon's vertices, its diagonals, and every crossing they make, at exact golden proportions. That is what a designer building a five-fold mark actually needs — not a star to trace, but the underlying skeleton to place elements on.
And use the construction-step control while you are learning it. Building the figure up from five points to five chords to the inner pentagon, rather than seeing it complete, is the difference between recognising a pentagram and understanding one.
Constructing it with a compass
The classical construction is worth knowing, because it is the one place where a five-fold figure stops being awkward. Draw a circle and a diameter. Bisect one radius to find its midpoint. Put the compass there and open it to the top of the circle, then swing that arc down to the diameter; the point where it lands gives you the length of a pentagon side. Step that length around the circumference and it closes, five times.
The construction works because the length it produces is exactly the chord subtending 72 degrees, and the bisected radius is where the golden ratio enters — the same halving the phi rectangle tool uses to build the golden rectangle. Euclid sets both down in the Elements: the pentagon in Book IV, and the ratio itself as division in extreme and mean ratio in Book VI, Definition 3 (trans. T.L. Heath, Cambridge University Press, 1908). It is also the reason a pentagon is constructible with compass and straightedge at all, which not every regular polygon is: a heptagon cannot be built this way, and Gauss settled exactly which ones can.
Knowing this changes what the overlay is for. It is not a substitute for the construction; it is the check on it. Build the pentagon by hand, lay the exact one over your drawing, and any accumulated drift shows up at the fifth step, where it arrives all at once as a gap.
One practical caution about size. The inner pentagon is 0.382 of the outer radius, so at any size the second generation of the figure is well under half the first, and the third is under fifteen percent. If you are cutting, engraving or printing a nested pentagram, the third generation is usually below the resolution of the process before it is below the resolution of the eye — which is why traditional nested versions stop at two and why a design that looks fine on screen can arrive as a smudge.
The overlay's own line-width control is the check for that. Set the weight to the thinnest line your process can actually hold, look at the innermost generation you want, and if the lines touch, that generation is not going to survive. It is a thirty-second test that saves a plate.
Where a pentagram gets used
Five-fold marks are the ones I cannot construct by eye. Having the pentagon and every diagonal crossing at exact proportions is what makes the mark hold together at small sizes.
For cut work I need the vector, and I need the inner pentagon as a separate path. Exporting SVG with the parts I chose is the whole workflow.
It is how I teach incommensurability. Showing the star inside the pentagon inside the star, going down forever, lands better than any proof I have tried.
Pentagram: frequently asked questions
The geometry
Where is the golden ratio in a pentagram?
In every chord. Each of the five is cut by two crossings into three segments in the ratio φ : 1 : φ — measurably 0.72654, 0.44903, 0.72654 of the radius. It is also in the inner pentagon, whose circumradius is 1/φ² of the outer.
How big is the pentagon inside the star?
Its circumradius is 0.38197 of the outer circle's, which is exactly 1/φ². The overlay draws it at that value rather than an approximation, which matters because inscribing another star in it repeats the figure at the same ratio, indefinitely.
Why did the Pythagoreans use it?
Because it demonstrates incommensurability. The diagonal and side of a regular pentagon share no common measure, and the pentagram makes that visible as an unending recursion. For a school whose founding claim was that everything is whole-number ratio, that was a serious problem.
Is a point-down pentagram geometrically different?
No. It is the same figure rotated, and the overlay's own transform turns it. The distinction is cultural and comparatively recent — Éliphas Lévi in the 19th century, Anton LaVey in the 20th — and the construction has no opinion about which way up it sits. The pentagram overlay page traces where that reading came from.
Can I draw just the pentagon?
Yes — turn the star off and keep the outer pentagon. A regular pentagon at an exact size is genuinely awkward to construct by hand and is what most five-fold design work actually needs.
Using it
What does the construction-step control do?
It builds the figure up rather than showing it complete, which is the difference between recognising a pentagram and understanding how it is made. Useful for teaching, and for screenshots that have to explain themselves.
Can I rotate it onto something in a photograph?
Yes. The overlay carries its own transform, so you can drag, scale and rotate the star over an object without moving the image underneath it.
How do I turn it into a clean pentagon?
Switch the outer pentagon on and the star's chords off, or keep the inner golden pentagon alone. The figure is built from five points on a circle, so the pentagon and the star are two readings of the same construction rather than two different drawings.
How do I fit it over something in a photograph?
Scale it so the boundary circle sits on the shape's circumscribing circle, then rotate — five-fold symmetry means there are five orientations that fit, so turn it until a point lands where the subject's own point does. A starfish or a flower will settle immediately or not at all.
Export and print
Can I export it for cutting or engraving?
Yes. SVG export gives true vector straight lines, which is what a laser cutter, plotter or CNC path needs. Raster export goes to 600 DPI, sized from the paper format you chose.
What size can I print it?
Up to 600 DPI on any format from A5 to A2, and the export is sized from the paper rather than from your screen. A pentagram has no fine detail to lose, so the practical ceiling is the printer.
Choosing a grid
Should I use a drawing program's star tool instead?
Only if you do not care about the proportions. A star tool gives you five points and a spike ratio you set by dragging; this places the points at exactly 72° and lets the chords cross where the geometry says, which is where φ actually appears in the figure.
Practical matters
Does my image get uploaded?
No. Everything happens in your browser — the image is drawn to a canvas on your own device and never sent anywhere. There is no account and no upload step.
Is the point-down version different?
Geometrically it is the same figure rotated 180°, with identical proportions and crossings. Everything else attached to the distinction is cultural, and quite recent — the association of the inverted star with anything sinister dates from the nineteenth century.
Can I use it for a logo or a printed piece?
Yes. A five-pointed star is not anyone's property as a shape, exports carry no watermark and the terms leave your work with you. Check that the specific mark you build is not already a registered trademark in your sector — that is a separate question from the geometry.
Open the tool Pentagram generator
Five chords, ten golden crossings
The pentagram draws exactly, so its crossings are golden rather than nearly golden. Keep the parts you need and export vector or 600 DPI. No signup, nothing uploaded.
Back to the generator →