Fihankra represents a walled compound house, drawn as a symmetrical, enclosed geometric pattern read as a floor plan or outer wall rather than as a picture of any single building's facade, and Willis glosses its meaning as security, safety, and specifically the solidarity of an entire household or community held within one enclosure. The compound-house form the symbol references was, historically, a standard unit of Akan domestic architecture, an enclosed courtyard structure housing an extended family rather than a single nuclear household, so Fihankra's security is explicitly a collective, multi-generational security rather than the safety of one person or one small family alone, a scale of protection built into the architectural reference itself.
Willis notes that compound-house Akan architecture of the kind Fihankra references is less commonly built today than in earlier periods, most contemporary Akan housing following other layouts, so the symbol's continued use on cloth again illustrates the pattern, recorded elsewhere in this entry's companion articles, of an Adinkra design outlasting the everyday prevalence of the physical form it depicts. Willis situates Fihankra among a handful of Adinkra designs drawn from architecture rather than from nature, proverb speech, or regalia, a smaller category within the sixty core symbols than the natural-world designs.