Green is the color of freedom.
It is the mikan groves, lush and fragrant, in the summer. It is the smooth, glossy feel of a leaf between the pads of her thumb and forefinger. It is damp grass in the morning curling between her toes.
And then it is money. Crisp and worn, it has seen more hands than she knows people and bought more than she can ever dream to afford. It is the wrinkled imprint in the paper and a number that tells her how much her village is worth.
Green is her key, not her freedom, and she needs more.
Nami had been sewn inside her own skin with a needle digging ink into her arm. The pain, of the moment, had been inconsequential in comparison to the realization that she had been branded as property. She had been as good as cattle, driven like cattle.
She hated the mark, and her arm, and the ink sinking into her skin like poison.
When she would sail, she would recall just how sea spray and sunshine once felt on bare skin. But the tattoo did not have the right to see day. Arlong deserved what rebellion Nami still had in her.
Red is the color of freedom.
It is the banners of war found in the blood running slick down her arm and that proud, bold vest. It is the band pulled tight across a hat perched sideways on her head, with her fingers digging hard and pleading into the curved, straw rim. It is the dried imprint of her toil being turned to splinters.
It is, briefly, the seething heat in the edges of her vision, and the violent crack her staff makes when it meets the colonel's jaw. It is that just as much as it had been Luffy's fury and his fist digging knuckles into giving, grey flesh.
It is the right to have the sun against her skin for far too long, and an inability to care. Just to love the sea and sky and how they feel as they embrace her.
Then, finally, it is laughter. A loud and harsh, unfamiliar bark; it breaks into the evening with all of the finesse and subtlety of a hammer against glass and continues on long into the night.
Red is freedom in its essence and she does not need more. She wants it.