Monkey D. Dragon

Dragon is a tall man past his middle years, his long black hair shaggy and marked by a widow's peak. The left half of his face bears a striking deep-red tattoo of interlocking diamond shapes. Stubble shadows his chin, his eyes sit hooded beneath a strong jaw, and he typically drapes himself in a long forest-green cloak worn over the orange garb of a revolutionary, with a dark coat and dark trousers beneath. After the timeskip his hair grows past his shoulders. As a teenage Marine cadet his hair was shorter and spikier, the diamond design appeared only as an armband, and the facial tattoo did not surface until sometime between his thirties and forties.

Dragon means to tear down the World Government and the privileged nobility that lets the Celestial Dragons trample ordinary people, and he viewed the same rot at smaller scale in his native Goa Kingdom. He usually wears a grim, focused expression and treasures intelligence, keeping current on world affairs through a veteran spy network. A clear-eyed realist, he warns his followers not to celebrate small wins given the government's overwhelming might, yet at heart he stays hopeful, occasionally smiling at the shifting tides of history and taking quiet delight in the part his pirate son plays in it. He guards his private life so tightly that even close confidants like Ivankov knew nothing of his family. For all that, he showed deep compassion toward the oppressed, taking Sabo's despair seriously and rescuing many victims of noble cruelty.

Born in the Goa Kingdom as Garp's son, Dragon followed his father into the Marines and trained there as a young man. As a cadet he was shipped to God Valley under the guise of a drill, only to find the Marines arranging the World Nobles' Native Hunting Competition. Horrified, he fled the slaughter carrying the infant twins Shanks and Shamrock at the request of their dying mother, tranquilized a noble to spare a young Kuma, and ultimately lost both babies amid the chaos before escaping with a band of survivors he forced his superiors to rescue at gunpoint. Back at Marineford he was thrown in a cell, told Garp he was finished with the Marines, and was quietly set free by his father. By the age of thirty he led the small, underfunded Freedom Fighters, witnessed Roger's execution, and after Ohara's destruction visited the ruins to mourn his colleague Clover and vowed to build a force capable of resisting the government. He brought Ivankov, Kuma, and Ginny into the fold and reshaped the militia into the Revolutionary Army. Around thirty-six he fathered Luffy, whom he left with Garp to raise, telling no one of the boy. Twelve years before the main story he returned to Goa, orchestrated a rescue during the Gray Terminal blaze, and pulled Sabo from the wreck of his boat after a World Noble destroyed it, taking the child into his ranks. He surfaced again at Loguetown, where a sudden gale scattered the Marines and let Luffy slip from Smoker's grasp, and across later events he has steered the Revolution through Sabo's rise, the fall of Baltigo, Kuma's enslavement, and the upheaval following Vegapunk's worldwide broadcast.