For this story I thought I would begin by seeing what image Midjourney would conjure up with the single-word prompt ‘Art’. It gave me a few but there was something abut this one that intrigued me.
I put the image into Claude with the prompt, ‘Use this unusual picture as a prompt for a somewhat eerie 300 word short story.’ I used the latest version of Claude which is Opus 4.6 and it took a while ‘thinking’ before it actually produced this story.
The Finishing Touch
The old man’s hands didn’t tremble anymore. That was the first thing people noticed, though they rarely lived long enough to mention it to anyone.
“Hold still, dear,” he murmured, tilting her chin upward with one weathered finger. The brush, so small, so impossibly fine, traced the curve of her lower lip. Vermillion. Always vermillion.
The girl in the red coat sat perfectly still. Not because she was obedient. Not because she was brave. Because she couldn’t move. Hadn’t been able to since she’d stepped through his door forty minutes ago, drawn by the smell of oil paint and something sweeter underneath, something like woodsmoke and old flowers.
His studio occupied the narrow space above the butcher’s shop on Saddleworth Road, and nobody in the village found that strange. Nobody found anything about Mr Hargreaves strange, which was itself the strangest thing of all. Seventy years he’d lived there. Longer, whispered some. The butcher’s shop had changed hands nine times beneath him.
“Nearly done,” he said softly. “You’ll be my finest yet.”
Behind him, the canvases watched. Dozens of them, leaning shoulder to shoulder against every wall. Portraits of children, boys and girls spanning what seemed like centuries of fashion. Each one luminous. Each one breathing with a vitality that made your chest ache.
Each one wearing that same expression the girl wore now. Eyes wide. Lips parted. That exquisite instant between wonder and terror. He finished the final stroke and stepped back. The brush dropped.
On the canvas beside him, a new portrait glistened, a girl in a red coat, alive in every brushstroke, mouth open as if trying to scream through layers of paint and varnish and years.
The chair before him was empty. Mr Hargreaves smiled, and began preparing a fresh canvas.
Why Did Claude Write This Story?
I often have conversations with different AI chatbots – they can be extremely illuminating. In this case I asked Claude, “What was your thinking behind the story you wrote?” Here is its answer:
“Glad you asked — there were a few threads I was pulling on:
The image itself gave me an immediate fairy tale unease. The power dynamic between the elderly figure and the young girl, the intimacy of the gesture, the paintbrush touching her lips, the muted palette with those sharp reds, it all felt like a scene caught halfway between tenderness and predation. I wanted the story to live in that ambiguity.
The paintbrush as the key detail. Rather than making him a doctor or some generic sinister figure, I leaned into what was literally there, an artist with a brush. That let me build the central horror mechanic: he’s not painting portraits of children, he’s painting children into portraits. The brush on the lip becomes the finishing touch of a literal transformation.
The “hidden in plain sight” trope. I love the idea of a monster so embedded in a community that nobody questions them. Seventy years above the butcher’s shop, nine butchers come and gone, that single detail does a lot of world building without exposition. It suggests immortality, or something close to it, without ever stating it outright.
The Manchester/Northern England setting felt natural given your preferences, and Saddleworth Road gave it that grounded, specific quality that makes horror land harder. Real place names make unreal things feel closer.
Structure-wise, I wanted the reveal to unfold gradually, the frozen girl, the canvases watching, the portraits spanning centuries, so the reader arrives at the horror just before the story confirms it. That final empty chair does the work of a much longer scene. The story suggests he’s been doing this for a very long time and will continue indefinitely, which I find more unsettling than any single act of violence.
Essentially: what if the act of artistic creation was literally an act of consumption?“
The AI Grandad 