Calves at birth are ashen gray to brown. Within a week or two, calves become tawny-brown. The coloration pales with age. In general, younger individuals are darkest. Limbs are modified into flippers.
Flippers are hairless.
The skin on the soles of a walrus' flippers is thick and rough, providing traction on land and ice. The foreflippers, or pectoral flippers, have all the major skeletal elements of the forelimbs of land mammals, but they're foreshortened and modified. A walrus' foreflippers are short and square. Each foreflipper has five digits of about equal length. Each digit has a small and inconspicuous claw.