A cairo:pattern-t structure represents a source when drawing onto a surface. There are different subtypes of cairo:pattern-t structures, for different types of sources; for example, the cairo:pattern-create-rgb function creates a pattern for a solid opaque color.

Other than various cairo:pattern-create-type functions, some of the pattern types can be implicitly created using various cario:set-source-type functions, for example the cairo:set-source-rgb function.

The type of a pattern can be queried with the cairo:pattern-type function.

Memory management of the cairo:pattern-t structure is done with the cairo:pattern-reference and cairo:pattern-destroy functions.