Red Hat Inc. is dropping its legendary “Shadowman” logo after almost 20 years as its proposed $34 billion acquisition by IBM Corp. nears completion.

The enterprise software company debuted its new logo (pictured) this week, saying that six of its employees, including one high-ranking executive, already have it tattooed onto their bodies.

The revamped logo suggests Red Hat is looking to refresh its image as it gears up for the next stage of its journey.

In a blog post, Tim Yeaton, Red Hat’s executive vice president of corporate marketing, said one reason for the change is that most people didn’t know what the old Shadowman was supposed to represent. It’s actually supposed to be a kind of heroic spy, but the company’s research showed that in fact, many people considered it to be “secretive, sinister or sneaky.”

“The Brand team and I were heartbroken,” Yeaton wrote. “These words couldn’t have been further from my deeply held impressions of Red Hat, which I’d formed well before joining the company.”

The old “Shadowman” logo was too “sinister,” Red Hat said.

And so Red Hat decided, as one of the world’s most prominent open-source software companies, to launch what it called the “Open Brand Project,” effectively open-sourcing the design of the new logo to its employees. The Open Brand Project led to the creation of the “Tattoo Team,” which was a committee of Red Hat employees who had already tattooed the old logo onto their bodies, tasked with coming up with a new design.

The new logo reflects Red Hat’s evolution from a “scrappy upstart ‘sneaking’ into data centers with boxed copies of a Linux-based operating system, to the world’s leading provider of open-source solutions for enterprise hybrid cloud environments,” Yeaton said.

With the new logo, “we’ve truly stepped out of the shadows,” he added.

Out of the shadows and into the embrace of IBM, which shocked the technology world when it announced its plans to buy Red Hat late last year in what will be its biggest-ever acquisition. The takeover is set to be finalized later this year, and although IBM intends to keep Red Hat as a separate business identity, many analysts believe it should give the company more scope to take on rivals such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC.

Images: Red Hat