Might not be super subtle, but quite original in its form.
Source Alex Smith
Nice little grid. Would work great as a base on top of some other patterns.
Source Arno Gregorian
From a drawing in 'Friend or Fortune? The story of a strange year', Robert Overton, 1897.
Source Firkin
A seamless pattern formed from a square tile. The tile can be retrieved by selecting the rectangle in Inkscape and using shift-alt-i.
Source Firkin
From a drawing in 'Chambéry à la fin du XIVe siècle', Timoleon Chapperon, 1863.
Source Firkin
Looks like an old wall. I guess that’s it then?
Source Viahorizon
Greyscale version of a pattern that came out of playing with the 'light rays' plug-in for Paint.net
Source Firkin
The tile this is formed from can be retrieved in Inkscape by selecting the rectangle and using shift+alt+i
Source Firkin
A seamless background pattern with a texture of wood planks. This wood background pattern has vertically arranged planks. You may try to rotate it 90°, to see how it will look like when the wood planks are arranged horizontally.
Source V. Hartikainen
Remixed from a drawing that was uploaded to Pixabay by captenpub.
Source Firkin
A seamless background pattern of dark brown wood planks.
Source V. Hartikainen
Made by distorting a simple pattern using the 'sin waves' plugin for Paint.net and vectorising in Vector Magic
Source Firkin
Luxurious looking pattern (for a T-shirt maybe?) with a hint of green.
Source Simon Meek
Background Wall, Art Abstract, Block Well & CC0 texture.
Source Ractapopulous
An emulated “transparent” background pattern, like that of all kinds of computer graphics software.
Source AdamStanislav
Wasn't satisfied with the original's colouring. Too much component transfer and colormatrixes yet the results are lacking a bit. So this time it is a simple black to transparent fade, making it possible remixing easily once there will be other blending modes supported as well. Probably in inkscape 0.92.
Source Lazur URH
Number 3 in a series of 5 beautiful patterns. Can be found in colors on the submitter’s website.
Source Janos Koos
From a drawing in 'Art Embroidery', M.S. Lockwood and E. Glaister, 1878.
Source Firkin
Lovely pattern with splattered vintage speckles.
Source David Pomfret
Sort of like the Photoshop transparent background, but better!
Source Alex Parker
A dark metallic background with a pattern of stamped dots. Here's a dark "metallic" background pattern for you.
Source V. Hartikainen
Medium gray fabric pattern with 45-degree lines going across.
Source Atle Mo
Dark wooden pattern, given the subtle treatment. based on texture from Cloaks.
Tweed is back in style – you heard it here first. Also, the @2X version here is great!
Source Simon Leo