Sounds like something copied from Battlestar Gallactica. One of the characters paints the same symbol her whole life and eventually discovers it means something significant for her and all of humanity.
Which in turn sounds a bit like the Star Trek:TNG episode "The Chase" where a symbol seen all over the universe brings four alien species together to find a message from an ancient race they all descended from.
The original BG is older than TNG, not sure if that story came from the original or the remake though.
That plot point was the remake.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) has a similar element: several people obsessing over a mountain-like shape, they paint it, sculpt it, etc, and want to travel there. Later it turns out to be the place where the UFOs arrive.