Describing big Frank (the robust trucker and beau of Mrs. Hays, the widow who runs the Silver Spur Court in Elphinstone, a small town in the Rocky Mountains where Lolita falls ill and is hospitalized on June 28, 1949), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) compares a girl charmingly tattoed on Frank's maimed hand to some sly fairy:
I heard the sound of whistling lips nearing the half-opened door of my cabin, and then a thump upon it.