I've been going to my same tattoo artist for 8 years and she recently upped her price to $250 an hour. She deserves to be paid that well but I can't afford that anymore, what do I do?
Easy. Here are three pragmatic counterstrategies:
Reduce the value of your dollars, such that spending your $250 becomes a lesser burden.
Murder or abduct whichever final-boss-Economist is in charge of your country's monetary policy, and "persuade" him and/or her to champion the printing of infinite banknotes. Go absolutely nuts with it. "Weimars were WIMPS" shall be the motto on the lips of your country's monetary-policy-mooks. Quintillion-to-one inflation? Hah. Amateurs!
Pair this with a really aggressive price-fixing policy on tattoo parlours and only tattoo parlours. Thunder from every pulpit that those tattooist-fat-cats have had it too good for too long! Someone's going to stand up to those money-grubbing bastards at last, and by golly, that someone is you. You may now afford your $250/hr tattooing with ease.
Lengthen the duration of your hours, such that your $250 stretches further.
Crash a gazillion asteroids into the Earth. But only with glancing equatorial hammer-blows, and against the Earth's rotation. The idea is to slow our home planet's daily spin and thus increase its day length, from its current and hideously zippy duration of 86,400 seconds, up to billions and trillions of seconds. Placid. Refined. Civilised. Each day shall lengthen to weeks and months. A single 1/24th of that updated daily duration becomes oodles of time for a really really wicked-sick tattoo. Become morbidly obese, just to clear the epidermal decks for a tat that's extra-ginormous and THEREFORE extra-rad. You'd do that, yeah? You're cool, yeah? Awesome. Then I'll pay for your first fifty cheeseburgers. Once obese'd, demand an inky panorama of your entire rocketry programme. Make your thousands of rockets spell out HA HA HA with their crisscrossing exhausts.
Be warned, though! The Earth's polar diameter, i.e. the straight-line distance between the North Pole and South Pole, via the core: that's 40km shorter than any two opposing points on the Equator. Why? The physics-forces of daily rotation: they've kind of radially squidged-out the Earth, from a sphere and into an "oblate spheroid", as I understand today's youngsters phrase things.
Remove that rotation? The entire planet will crunch back into a sphere. By 40km. The earthquakes will be unbelievable. Every structure will crumble. So stay ten steps ahead of every greasy real-estate tycoon and corner the market in bouncy castles while they're still cheap. The only domicile guaranteed earthquake-proof! They just wobble. Actually, do that anyway. Everyone loves bouncy castles. They're exquisite. But anyhoo! I think we can all agree: pulverising the entire Earth is a small price to pay for rad tattoo-discounts. So get asteroid-ing, baby.
Trash the competence and/or reputation of your beloved artist, so $250/hr resumes being an impossible dream for her.
Why not just learn tattooing yourself? Simply open a competing parlour next door, and charge negative bucks, i.e., actually pay your own customers, to allow you to tattoo upon them: THE TATTOO PARLOUR NEXT DOOR REALLY SUCKS, ALSO MAY I INTEREST YOU IN A GAZILLION ASTEROIDS AND/OR BOUNCY CASTLES?