On my system, with the default figure size, it came out as
im=imagesc(magic(3)); axis image; hold on
plot(2,2,'marker','x','MarkerSize',165,'Color','white')
However, if there were any kind of resizing, the marker would stay the same size on the screen rather than resizing with the box. It is therefore better to draw the lines, such as
plot([1.5 2.5 nan 2.5 1.5], [1.5 2.5 nan 1.5 2.5],'Color','white')