The best way to do this is to search "heat map" or "confusion matrix" rather than image, then there are two good options:
Using matplotlib only, with imshow() and text() as building blocks the solution is actually not that hard, and here are some examples.
Using seaborn which is a data visualisation package and the solution is essentially a one-liner using seaborn.heatmap() as shown in these examples.
My problem was really tunnel vision, coming at it from an image processing mindset, and not thinking about what other communities have a need to display the same thing even if they call it by a different name.