A theoretical investigation of dust-acoustic solitary waves in three-component unmagnetized dusty plasma consisting of trapped electrons, Maxwellian ions, and arbitrarily charged cold mobile dust was done. It has been found that, owing to the departure from the Maxwellian electron distribution to a vortex-like one, the dynamics of small but finite amplitude dust-acoustic (DA) waves is governed by a nonlinear equation of modified Korteweg–de Vries (mKdV) type (instead of KdV). The reductive perturbation method was employed to study the basic features (amplitude, width, speed, etc.) of DA solitary waves which are significantly modified by the presence of trapped electrons. The implications of our results in space and laboratory plasmas are briefly discussed.