es match. The following example checks that the center of a circle is within the circle >>> center = 0, 0 >>> c = Circle(center, radius=1) >>> c.contains_point(center) True The convention of checking against the transformed patch stems from the fact that this method is predominantly used to check if display coordinates (e.g. from mouse events) are within the patch. If you want to do the above check with data coordinates, you have to properly transform them first: >>> center = 0, 0 >>> c = Circle(center, radius=1) >>> plt.gca().add_patch(c) >>> transformed_center = c.get_transform().transform(center) >>> c.contains_point(transformed_center) True )