We carried out deep optical observations of the middle-aged \gamma -ray pulsar PSR J1741 - 2054 with the Very Large Telescope ( VLT ) .
We identified two objects , of magnitudes m _ { v } = 23.10 \pm 0.05 and m _ { v } = 25.32 \pm 0.08 , at positions consistent with the very accurate Chandra coordinates of the pulsar , the faintest of which is more likely to be its counterpart .
From the VLT images we also detected the known bow-shock nebula around PSR J1741 - 2054 .
The nebula is displaced by \sim 0 \farcs 9 ( at the 3 \sigma confidence level ) with respect to its position measured in archival data , showing that the shock propagates in the interstellar medium consistently with the pulsar proper motion .
Finally , we could not find evidence of large-scale extended optical emission associated with the pulsar wind nebula detected by Chandra , down to a surface brightness limit of \sim 28.1 magnitudes arcsec ^ { -2 } .
Future observations are needed to confirm the optical identification of PSR J1741 - 2054 and characterise the spectrum of its counterpart .