Comment 10 for bug 955141

I am guessing that this is due to a problem in display/drawing-item.cpp where the "intermediate" DrawingSurface is created without accounting for any scaling. Contrast this line in sp-pattern.cpp

Inkscape::DrawingSurface temp(pattern_tile, c.ceil());

to this line in drawing-item.cpp

DrawingSurface intermediate(*iarea);

The second (optional) argument gives a scaling to the surface (that then must be accounted for later). If there is no scaling, the bitmap representing the pattern will be the same size as the default pattern size regardless of any zoom or pattern transformation. I don't know enough to see a quick and obvious way to fix this.