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 function cairo-pattern-create-rgb 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 cairo-set-source-type functions; for example the function cairo-set-source-rgb.

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

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