Abstract We study the electromagnetic form factors of the lowest-lying singly heavy baryons in a pion mean-field approach, which is also known as the SU(3) chiral quark-soliton model. In the limit of the heavy-quark mass, the dynamics inside a singly heavy baryon is governed by the valence quarks, while the heavy quark remains as a static one. In this framework, a singly heavy baryon is described by combining the soliton with the singly heavy quark. In the infinitely heavy-quark mass limit, we can compute the electric quadrupole form factors of the baryon sextet with spin 3/2, with the rotational and linear corrections of the explicit flavor SU(3) symmetry breaking taken into account. We find that the sea-quark contributions or the Dirac-sea level contributions dominate over the valence-quark contributions in the lower region. We examined the effects of explicit flavor SU(3) symmetry breaking in detail. The numerical results are also compared with the recent data from the lattice calculation with the unphysical value of the pion mass considered, which was used in the lattice calculation.